Placer County offering free disposal of food spoiled from power outage

Placer County and Recology, the county’s main trash hauler, are teaming up to offer free disposal of food that has spoiled due to the PG&E power shutoffs, according to Placer County’s website.

This week’s shutoff that purposefully cut power to 35 counties across Northern California during a public safety power shutoff event in an effort to prevent wildfires was caused by faulty power lines. Around 800,000 customers – an estimated 1.5 million Californians – were affected.

With power having been restored to 99.5 percent of the customers affected by the outage, people are now starting to take stock of what food may have gone bad or spoiled while the power was off. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that food kept in an unopened refrigerator should stay cold for 48 hours and frozen foods in the freezer should stay frozen for 24-48 hours.

Additionally, Nevada County Environmental Health officials offered these tips for which items should be tossed:

• Your food is safe if your storage devices ran on generators.
• You do not need to throw out animal proteins as long as your refrigerator unit was 41 degrees or colder the entire time you were without power if you did not have a generator.
• Dairy animal proteins, cut vegetables and fruits from reach-in refrigerators should be tossed.

Disposal of spoiled food is available and these Auburn/Placer Recology locations:

• Recology Auburn Placer: 12305 Shale Ridge Road (8 a.m.-5 p.m.)
• Meadow Vista: 2950 Combie Road (8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.)
• Foresthill: 6699 Patent Road (8 a.m.-5 p.m)

Spoiled food can be disposed in it’s original packaging.

This story was originally published October 12, 2019 at 4:35 PM.