Cost of Durham power outage: Spoiled food, lost business, missed paychecks

Mike D's BBQ at 455 South Driver St. was forced to close Wednesday due to the outage.

"If you total the last couple days, products lost and loss of revenue, it's $7,000 that we've lost over the past couple of days,” owner Michael De Los Santos said.

De Los Santos said he saved most of the meat. He said other restaurants offered to store it for him.

However, De Los Santos did lose other food.

"We ended up having to get rid of, like, coleslaw, potato salad and probably the thing that hurt the most was our smoked chicken salad,” he said.

De Los Santos says they will have to take the loss because his insurance requires a power outage of 72 hours to file a claim. He is optimistic they can recoup it, but he says he worries about his employees and people in the neighborhood.

"We employ -- 85, 90% of our employees live within five miles of here,” he said. “We were closed for two days, so that means they're losing money this week.

“They're also at home losing groceries sitting in the cold."

Wayne Hunt lives in east Durham. He lost power and food.

“Looking at my income, we’re looking at $300 [or] $350 to feed a family of two,” Hunt said of his grocery shopping habits.

Hunt draws Social Security and has a tight budget. He pulled out a tin of pennies he's been saving to see what he could pick up at Food Lion.

“I’m going in to cash in so I can get me something to eat,” he said.

De Los Santos thinks lower socio-economic neighborhoods take the hit too often, and that needs to be addressed.

“I think there's a real infrastructure problem in neighborhoods that are considered low wealth, low income,” he said. “It usually happens to the African American neighborhoods.

“Maybe we can focus on that and make sure the infrastructure is updated and where it needs to be."