Murrysville residents fight to save food from spoiling, push through another day without power

MURRYSVILLE, Pa. — Hundreds of people in Murrysville remain without power Friday evening, more than three days after storms caused widespread damage on Tuesday.

A cooler inside Gertrude Laughrey’s home is filled with milk, yogurt, Ensure, and eggs.

“At $5 a dozen, I guess you better save those,” Laughrey said to Channel 11’s Andrew Havranek.

She and her husband have been without power since Tuesday’s storm. She’s tried to save as much as she could from the fridge and has another bin full of ice with waters and meals. Those meals were sent from her husband’s health insurance on Thursday. He’s been in and out of the hospital and nursing homes.

“It’ll have to do,” Laughrey said.

She’s had to cancel nurse visits for her husband because she doesn’t have power for them to hook things up.

They also run water from two wells.

Because they don’t have power, they don’t have running water.

“We can’t even flush our commodes,” Laughrey said. “This morning, I took a hanger and fished out the toilet tissue and put it in a bag and put it in the trash. I can’t let them fill up like that. I’ll never be able to flush them.”

She’s not alone. Homes all around her neighborhood off of Sardis Road are dark, including a home where a tree snapped. The homeowner didn’t want to share his name or show his face on camera, but he showed Channel 11’s Andrew Havranek his basement, where he has a cooler hooked up to a generator to keep 300 pounds of meat fresh.

“There’s turkey, there’s deer, [my son] buys from the farm market all kinds of beef,” he said.

He was able to get the last generator at a local store in Murrysville on Tuesday night.

On Friday, crews with First Energy were working on a substation in the woods between his house and Laughrey’s.

“The transmission line was damaged, and we’ve been working very hard to get that back on,” said Todd Meyers, spokesperson for First Energy.

Meyers said First Energy has crews from all over the region and other states helping out, and say power should be restored to most people in the Murrysville area either by the end of Saturday or by Monday.

Laughrey can’t wait.

“It’s like living in a primitive world,” she said.

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