ST. CLOUD, Fla. \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
City leaders and the nonprofit Osceola Response Team are providing free dinners for residents affected by the outages.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
She said the outages have forced her and her cat to stay with relatives.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor many folks, that is not a luxury,\u201d Muirhead said. \u201cThey don\u2019t have a backbone. Like I have a network of people where they can go crash. I shouldn\u2019t have to do that when I have a dwelling here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Muirhead said she contacted property management, COARE Communities, for help. She shared one response she said she received from the office.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt 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,\u201d the message said.<\/p>\n
OUC, the electric provider for the community, said it is not showing outages in the area.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter checking in with operations, OUC is not experiencing any outages at this time,\u201d a OUC spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
St. Cloud Mayor Chris Robertson said city leaders have visited the community several times since the issues began in early August.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve brought them food, brought them water,\u201d Robertson said. \u201cWe\u2019re just there to offer a shoulder to lean on and be a voice for the citizens here. These are our residents of our community.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he\u2019s been made aware of close to 50 homes that\u2019ve been affected over the last month.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Robertson said the city\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
A request for comment was sent to property management about OUC\u2019s statement and what is being done to resolve the issue.<\/p>\n
COARE Communities did not respond and was not physically present on site.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ST. CLOUD, Fla. \u2014 Residents of a St. Cloud mobile home park say they have dealt with inconsistent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389016,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[24498,115,139,141,140,1976,835],"class_list":["post-389015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-jordan-mead","tag-news","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-osceola-county","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}