Bend business scramble before power shut off

The lights were going out for six hours at 11 p.m. Wednesday for 4,900 Pacific Power customers on the the south side of Bend.

It was being turned off for several hours as crews continue to work on the Murphy Road/Third Street improvement project.

“Pacific Power needs to move its poles, and so they’ll be doing that and moving some wiring around, too,” ODOT spokesman Peter Murphy said Wednesday.

At C.E. Lovejoy’s Brookswood Market,, employees spent the night moving hundreds of pounds of frozen and perishable foods onto trucks.

“When we started doing our first pallets full, we were like, ‘Oh, my gosh — this is going to be an all night thing,'” Assistant Manager Tim Kelly said. “But everybody is moving pretty good.”

The store officials said they don’t feel they were given enough time to prepare for the planned outage. Pacific Power sent out letters 48 hours in advance.

The move has created some frustration among business who were scrambling to come up with a plan.

“These kinds of things have to happen, in order for the bigger picture to take place,” Murphy said. “It then will make things better for that many more people who travel that highway.”

C.E. Lovejoy’s says they tried to get a generator, but the city was out; the closest was in Eugene and would have cost $800 just to get it to Central Oregon.

Wednesday night, they stuck to their plan and continued to move product, only to await the word Thursday morning when the power comes back on to put it all back on the shelves.

“We are here for our customers,” Kelly said. “We want to make sure that we keep the foods at temp and that when we open tomorrow at 7:30 a.m. we’ll be ready to go.”