ST. CLOUD, Fla. — Residents of a St. Cloud mobile home park say they have dealt with inconsistent power for several weeks, causing partial and full outages that have spoiled food and medications, damaged belongings and forced some people to rely on generators or stay elsewhere.
City leaders and the nonprofit Osceola Response Team are providing free dinners for residents affected by the outages.
The community center on site has also been opened for residents to cook meals while the power issues continue. Destiny Muirhead, who lives in the community, said her air conditioning and the power to her bathroom have not worked consistently for weeks.
She said the outages have forced her and her cat to stay with relatives.
“For many folks, that is not a luxury,” Muirhead said. “They don’t have a backbone. Like I have a network of people where they can go crash. I shouldn’t have to do that when I have a dwelling here.”
Muirhead said she contacted property management, COARE Communities, for help. She shared one response she said she received from the office.
“At this time, the electric company will not turn the power back on. We understand the inconvenience that this has caused. We will provide an update as soon as we have any additional information,” the message said.
OUC, the electric provider for the community, said it is not showing outages in the area.
“After checking in with operations, OUC is not experiencing any outages at this time,” a OUC spokesperson said.
St. Cloud Mayor Chris Robertson said city leaders have visited the community several times since the issues began in early August.
“We’ve brought them food, brought them water,” Robertson said. “We’re just there to offer a shoulder to lean on and be a voice for the citizens here. These are our residents of our community.”
He said he’s been made aware of close to 50 homes that’ve been affected over the last month.
“That’s the problem here. Every time these folks lose power for days on end, they restock their refrigerators, and then when the power goes out for, you know, three or four or five days at a time, they lose all that food in the refrigerator, it goes bad,” he said.
Robertson said the city’s code enforcement team and chief building official are in direct contact with the property owner, who he said is complying. Residents said they are still being billed in full for rent and electricity despite the ongoing power problems.
A request for comment was sent to property management about OUC’s statement and what is being done to resolve the issue.
COARE Communities did not respond and was not physically present on site.
Osceola Response Team and city leaders are serving dinner at the community center this week, including meals planned for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday beginning at 5 p.m.