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Resident urges town action on utility resilience after prolonged outages
Summary
In public comment, Rita Combs described extended landline, cell and internet outages and a Christmas‑day power loss that left elderly neighbors isolated; she urged the committee and town to pursue redundancy, transparency and a multi‑year resilience plan.
During the public‑comment portion of the Portola Valley Geologic Safety Committee meeting, resident Rita Combs described repeated and lengthy failures of utilities in her neighborhood and urged the committee and town to pursue concrete resilience measures.
Combs said she experienced a multi‑week landline outage between November and mid‑December and had no electricity on Christmas Day until after 6:30 p.m., leaving elderly neighbors without means to call for help. She described spending many hours on the phone with service providers and filing FCC reports and criticized frequent exceptions to undergrounding rules that she said left residents more vulnerable. Combs proposed a multi‑year plan (5, 10, 20 and 30‑year horizons) to harden infrastructure and suggested volunteering to help the town produce an emergency plan or to coordinate with town staff (Darcy, Mary) where appropriate.
Committee members thanked Combs for the detailed submission, noted parallel experiences in other neighborhoods, and agreed to put her written outline on next month’s agenda so members can examine it in compliance with Brown Act public‑notice rules. The Chair offered to provide scenarios to help structure the resilience plan and asked members to consider how the committee might assist town staff in addressing utility redundancy and emergency communications for vulnerable residents.
The committee did not take formal action on the comment at the meeting but directed that the topic be placed on the next meeting agenda for review.
