Jacksonville neighbors say power goes out several times per week

Jacksonville neighbors say their power has gone out unexpectedly several times during the past couple of weeks.

“I got up and it was cold, really cold. Then I realized the power was off,” Clark Smith said.

He and his neighbors said the power goes out for up to 20 minutes at a time.

“The longest time it was out was maybe an hour and a half,” Mia Swain said. “I had to come out and say, ‘Hey, is y’all’s power out?’”

Swain said the power went out several times in the past two weeks in the home she shares with her three young children.

“They’re watching their "Spongebob" or their "Dora." It’s like, ‘What’s going on?’ House is chaos,” she said.

Neighbors told Action News Jax that they saw JEA trucks in their neighborhood but weren’t getting answers about the outages.

“I would often see trucks rolling through but no one has ever responded or said anything when I called,” Swain said.

Action News Jax went to JEA for answers about the outages. A spokesperson said via email that a squirrel caused a fuse to blow Wednesday and that another outage was reported on Jan. 10.

"You just expect your service not to be interrupted, especially at inconvenient times when you’re getting ready for work,” Swain said.

The JEA spokesperson said JEA will continue to monitor the circuit.

Full statement from JEA:
We've taken a cursory look at the circuit for the address provided:
·        There was an outage today due to a blown fuse caused by a squirrel. 
·        There was a substation outage on 1/10, along with 3 "momentary" outages, which are short in duration. It's likely that the service was restored even before the customer was able to report the outage.

We understand that two calls were made from that particular address since November. We will continue to monitor the circuit to see if further action should be taken."

Cox Media Group