AUSTIN (KXAN)– After nearly a week without power, Daylon Garcia was finally able to flip on the lights at Curra’s Hyde Park on Tuesday afternoon.

“It was a lot of joy and then, ‘Okay, we got a lot of work to do now,'” he said.

He said he realized last Wednesday they lost power.

“From then on, it’s pretty much a, you know, a countdown of how long you have before, things really get bad,” Garcia said.

And it didn’t take long for things to get really bad. By the weekend, Garcia said they were throwing out thousands of dollars worth of spoiled food.

He said they’ve lost tens of thousands of dollars over the week, between bad food and lost income.

“One night of an ice storm and then we’re shut down for a week and nobody has answers,” Garcia said. “A kind of feeling of of almost like a sense of abandonment and helplessness.”

Star of Texas Veterinary Hospital started bringing back patients Tuesday after also losing power about a week ago.

“Sending people home, having doctors take telehealth visits over the phone just to kind of assess if we needed to direct any patients to another hospital,” explained Nova Servatious, client care specialist at the hospital.

She said patients and staff were inside when the facility blacked out.

The facility usually has 75-85 appointments a day and was closed for 4 and a half days due to the power outage.

“So at that point, we really had to kind of scramble and come together and figure out which emergency hospitals did have power so that we can kind of triage and send patients there as needed,” Servatious said.

Hospital administrators estimate they lost between $60-$75,000 for the week.

They’re still looking at a backlog of appointments for routine appointments like wellness checks and vaccines.

“We were successfully able to reschedule these appointments or do telemedicine appointments when applicable due to the hard work, ingenuity, and collaboration of our entire team,” said hospital administrator Dana Wile.

Garcia said it was a moment of relief to be able to switch on the lights, again, but his customers will still be offline until Thursday.

“Now begins the process of re-prepping all of that food and getting back all of our favorite menu items,” he said.

Another shock for the family-owned business of 30 years, after COVID-19 and the February 2021 storm.

“It’s just, you know, a punch in the gut,” Garcia said. “Looking into next year: What if it happens again? What if it happens a year after that? How many days, how many weeks are we going lose… business because a power grid failure or a tree falls on a line, and then nobody is around to fix it and the city won’t give you answers?”

“It just kind of seems that the blame shifts from person to person and year to year, it’s somebody else’s fault but there’s never really seems to be any changes,” he added.

The Garcia family set up a Go Fund Me page to help pay back about two dozen Curra’s Hyde Park employees who haven’t been able to work.

The goal is set for $5,000 and the family said they will match that amount.