In the 29 hours that Kath Noble’s mobile home park in Mesa was without power in July of 2023, she saw the many ways her neighbors were vulnerable.
The heat inside their mobile homes skyrocketed, which was especially dangerous for residents on oxygen tanks. Some people didn’t have access to cars to go to cooler places. And a resident walking around the park in the dark to check on a neighbor’s freezer took a fall that put him in the hospital for two days.
“I was so worried about them, especially this darling lady that lived two houses down from me,” said Noble, president of the Arizona Association of Manufactured Home Owners. “It was 115 degrees outside. It’s the most vulnerable ones that stayed, so we were worried about them.”
Each summer, Arizona communities see electricity outages as summer storms batter electrical grids and extreme heat means more people are using air conditioners, which puts more use on electric services.
Residents in mobile home parks are uniquely in peril from electricity outages during the summer: many people are elderly, making them at higher risk of health impacts from extreme heat, many parks have aging infrastructure and mobile homes themselves are often difficult to adequately cool and heat quickly. Between May 2023 and September 2024, 30% of Pima County’s indoor heat deaths took place in mobile homes.
This year, the Arizona Association of Manufactured Home Owners collaborated with a group of stakeholders to create flyers with a to-do list to prepare for an emergency outage during extreme heat. Partners in that effort include Arizona State University (with whom the association had worked on an academic paper on power outages in mobile home parks), the Manufactured Housing Communities of Arizona representing park owners, the cities of Phoenix and Mesa, Maricopa County, anti-poverty group Wildfire and utilities Arizona Public Service and Salt River Project.
There are two flyers, available in Spanish and English. One is for mobile home residents and the other for park managers and owners. (Download any of the versions at the bottom of this story). At the core of both is the need for communication during an outage, from managers but also between residents.
“Communication is really a huge, huge important issue,” Noble said. “Information like: here are the cooling centers, this is where we have a generator.”
Noble is based in Mesa, but unplanned electricity outages, particularly in summer, when there is more stress on the electric grid, are an issue across the state.
Tucson Electric Power, which provides electricity for most of the Tucson and Pima County area, shares average outage data by year. In 2024, the average TEP customer experienced about 68 minutes of interruption — higher than the 62 minutes in 2022 and 2023 but lower than the 74 minute score from 2021, the company said.
In the cases of mobile home parks, however, an outage may be prolonged because of the state of equipment owned by the park.
In the summer of 2024, a severe summer storm caused a 30-second TEP outage at a Tucson-area mobile home park. But poorly maintained park-owned equipment meant the full outage experienced by residents lasted 11 days. Residents who were able to leave did so because their neighbors shared information and drove them to a nearby hotel. Still, during that time, an elderly resident died.
Among the suggestions on the owner-focused flyer is for park owners to prepare for a possible outage by identifying high-voltage electricians who can provide emergency repairs as soon as possible.
Ahead of the summer heat, Noble and her neighbors are making a “good neighbors” list of people in the park who may need extra support in case of a power outage. They’re also canvassing their park to share the electricity outage flyers, along with information about heat illness and other resources, for residents.
“I’m always hopeful that we won’t experience an outage,” Noble said. “They always happen every summer, you just can’t prevent them. That is why we have a plan in place.”
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