WAYLAND, Mich. (WOOD) — Residents of a Wayland mobile home park are concerned and upset about a planned power outage set for a cold winter weekend.

“I’m worried more about my husband than myself,” an emotional Ruth Powless, who lives at Windsor Woods Village, said.

“I believe that some of the elderly do not even know this is happening, like my neighbor when I went to him last night. He hasn’t been out. He didn’t get his mail. He had no idea that this was happening,” resident Susan Bush said.

Residents at the mobile home park off W. Superior Street near US-131 got a notice from Consumers Energy in the mail informing them of the outage from 11 p.m. Saturday to 6 a.m. Sunday. West Michigan isn’t currently expecting snow this weekend, according to Storm Team 8, but the forecast low that night is below freezing.

“Why are they doing this at the holiday time, in the winter, when it’s so freezing cold?” neighbor Carol Palmatter wondered of Consumers. “Where’s your compassion? You claim you tell us you care, but you don’t.”

Consumers spokesman Brian Wheeler said the utility did not take the decision to plan an outage lightly, but crews need to make repairs to a nearby substation.

“We understand that people are affected by what we are doing. We often schedule outages like this for weekends and nighttimes because it is the less disruptive approach,” he said.

Wheeler said the power will likely go out after most people go to sleep and that by the time they wake up, it should be back. But people say the outage will affect the elderly and their machines, children and pets.

“We’ve got people, elderly, that are on oxygen machines that do plug in, they’re not just on a system. But we’ve got people on APAP machines,” neighbor Connie Edwards said, adding she was worried about pipes freezing. “Consumers didn’t even know we were a mobile home park when I called. They just send out addresses. So this could have been scheduled at a different time.”

“We understand that people have some concerns about the timing,” Wheeler said. “There’s never a good time for a power outage. We understand that. But we do think it’s necessary to move forward right now to make sure we get this repair made.”

The city of Wayland is opening its firehouse at 160 W. Superior St. near Main Street as a warming shelter during the outage. Neighbors were skeptical of that option.

“He is not in the best of shape, he’s not, and to go somewhere else sleep,” Powless said of her husband. “You go to the fire department? Who is going to sleep there with all the other people?”

Bush helped her elderly neighbors and says people need to be aware and turn their water on.

“I think that we’ll all survive, but the point is that they could have done this during the day,” she said. “We could have went to the mall, a movie, restaurant. We could have found something to do to stay warm.”