SURREY — The Surrey Food Bank has lost all its perishables after the weekend windstorm knocked out its power from Saturday through to roughly 11 a.m. Wednesday morning.
“It’s been dreadful, just terrible,” said director Marilyn Herrmann.
“We’ve gone five days without any kind of refrigeration,” she told the Now Wednesday. “We lost everything in the coolers. We had $2,000 to $3,000 of eggs and milk we had to dump.”
Herrmann said their coolers will last 24 to 36 hours and still keep food cold enough, but when Monday hit, she was panicking.
“I knew we’d lose everything.”
But she’s delighted to report that Save-On-Foods, operated by Overwaitea Food Group, has stepped to the plate and will be replacing all the lost product.
She’s taking the storm as a lesson going forward.
“We have to, as an organization, find a backup. We can’t rely on hydro, we’re going to have to get a generator or another emergency plan in place.
Herrmann said during the outage, the food bank helped many people who weren’t considered low-income.
“Anyone who came received food,” she said. “One family, they’d just gone and bought groceries Friday for the next two weeks and they lost everything. She asked me to please help her, and of course we did.
“It really has made me realize what an essential service we are in the community,” she added.
