DANVILLE (WSLS 10) - "Mayonaise, any of this type of stuff, it'll probably get thrown out," Abdul Hakim Abdullah explained as he stood in front of his nearly empty refrigerator Wednesday morning.
Condiments were almost all that Abdullah had left in his fridge Wednesday morning.
Overnight, when he realized that the power was going to be out for a long time, he packed up most of the food in his fridge and freezer and took it to a relative in town whose home had power.
"Salads, mushrooms, stuff like that, that's all going to go bad," Abdullah said pulling out the drawer in his fridge where those items are kept.
The woman who lives behind him was also struggling to save her food.
She put everything she could into her deep freezer when the power went out hoping that would help buy her some time, but by 9, the deep freezer had completely defrosted.
She said she really can't afford to lose all the food.
"I'm 76 and I live on Social Security. That would be an awful thing to have happen," she emphasized.
She said she had to resort to pulling the plexiglas cover off her front door in order to get a breeze.
"My survival panel, I have one on the front door and one on the back door," she explained as she stood at her front door holding the panel in her hands. "I had to yank it down."
Abddullah said people were outside for much of the night because it was simply too hot to be shut up inside. His wife uses a special breathing machine to help her sleep, but because the home had no power, she had to stay with a relative so she could use the machine.
Abdullah said the lack of information he's gotten from the utility department is frustrating.
"I just don't know if they have a plan already laid out for something like this; a contingency plan. I don't know if they have enough manpower to handle the problem."
More than 3,000 people lost power when the Brosville substation went offline because of a transformer failure.
The city's financial center, library, and Galileo Magnet High School were all closed today because of the power outage.
Late Wednesday afternoon, the city's power and light director said oil samples had been taken from the transformer and test were scheduled to be done on the samples to try to figure out why the transformer failed.