Millions in California Play Waiting Game over Electricity Shutoffs

PG&E cuts power to prevent wildfires

 

Shift supervisor James Quinn walks through a darkened CVS Pharmacy as downtown Sonoma, Calif., remains without power on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2019. Pacific Gas and Electric has cut power to more than half a million customers in Northern California hoping to prevent wildfires during dry, windy weather throughout the region. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

 

By BRIAN MELLEY and TERENCE CHEA Associated Press

SONOMA, Calif. (AP) — Millions of Californians played a waiting game with the winds Thursday as Pacific Gas & Electric watched the weather before deciding whether to restore power to an enormous portion of the state blacked out on purpose.

The state’s largest utility pulled the plug to prevent a repeat of the past two years when wind-blown power lines sparked deadly wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes.

The unpopular move that disrupted daily life — prompted by forecasts calling for dry, gusty weather — came after catastrophic fires sent PG&E into bankruptcy and forced it to take more aggressive steps to prevent blazes.

The blackouts began Wednesday, hitting more than 500,000 homes and businesses north of San Francisco Bay, in the wine country, the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills, where a November wildfire blamed on PG&E transmission lines killed 85 people and virtually incinerated the town of Paradise.

Late Wednesday night, after a full day of delays, PG&E began cutting power in the Bay Area, excluding the city of San Francisco.

Overall, about 734,000 customers and as many as 2 million people could be affected. PG&E has warned that they might have to do without power for days after the winds subside because “every inch” of the power system must be inspected by helicopters and thousands of groundworkers and declared safe before the grid is reactivated.

See also  Video: Firefighters Save Flag in California Wildfire

“It’s just kind of scary. It feels worse than Y2K. We don’t know how long,” Tianna Pasche of Oakland said before her area was powered down. “My two kids, their school situation keeps moving every second. It’s not clear if we need to pack for a week and go out of town or what to do. So I’m just trying to make sure we have water, food, charging stations and gas.”

“For me, this is a major inconvenience in my life as a parent but also, if it saves a life, I’m not going to complain about it,” she said.

Vehicles backs up on Highway 12 as traffic signals remain dark during a power outage on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2019, in Boyes Hot Springs, Calif. Pacific Gas and Electric has cut power to more than half a million customers in Northern California hoping to prevent wildfires during dry, windy weather throughout the region. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Residents of the Oakland Hills, where a wildfire in 1991 killed 25 people and destroyed thousands of homes, spent the morning buying bottled water, getting cash and filling their cars with gas.

In the northern wine country, most of downtown Sonoma was pitch black when Joseph Pokorski, a retiree, showed up for his morning ritual of drinking coffee, followed by beer and cocktails.

The Town Square bar was open and lit by lanterns, but coffee was out of the question and only cash was accepted. Pokorski decided to forgo a 30-minute wait for a cup of joe from the bakery next door and move on to beers and a couple greyhound cocktails of vodka and grapefruit juice.

See also  Wind-Blown Brush Fire Threatens Reno Apartments

“I’m not a coffee freak,” Pokorski said. “I can take it or leave. It’s no big thing.”

In the El Dorado Hills east of Sacramento, California, Ruth Self and her son were taking an outage in stride while leaving a Safeway grocery store that had been stripped nearly bare of bottled water and ice.

Self said she wasn’t upset, given the lives lost nearly a year ago in Paradise, invoking images of people who burned in their cars trying to escape.

“I just can’t imagine,” she said. “Hopefully (the outages) are only for a couple days. I think it’s more of a positive than a negative. Ask me again on Friday night when I haven’t had a shower in two days, when I’ve had to spend two days playing card games.”

There was some good news. PG&E also announced that by reconfiguring its power system, it had restored electricity to 44,000 customers who weren’t in areas of high fire risk, and it could bring back power to 60,000 to 80,000 customers in the Humboldt area, where gusty winds had subsided.

Also because of shifting forecasts, the utility said it was reducing the third phase of its blackout plan, set to begin Thursday, to only about 4,600 customers in Kern County — one-tenth of the original estimate.

Unsurprisingly, the unprecedented blackouts sparked anger. A customer threw eggs at a PG&E office in Oroville. A PG&E truck was hit by a bullet that shattered a window in Colusa County before Wednesday’s outages, although authorities couldn’t immediately say whether it was targeted. PG&E put up barricades around its San Francisco headquarters.

“We realize and understand the impact and the hardship” from the outages, said Sumeet Singh, head of PG&E’s Community Wildfire Safety Program. But he urged people not to take it out on PG&E workers.

See also  California Church Shows Support for Firefighters with Donations

“They have families that live in your communities, they have friends, they are members of your communities,” he said. “They’re doing this work in the interest of your safety.”

PG&E took drastic action because of hot, dry Diablo winds sweeping into Northern California, said Scott Strenfel, PG&E’s principal meteorologist. They were also part of a California-wide weather system that will produce Santa Ana winds in the south in the next day or so, he said.

“These (weather) events historically are the events that cause the most destructive wildfires in California history,” Strenfel said.

Crews work to connect generators in effort to keep the Caldecott Tunnel open to traffic during a possible power outage in the afternoon on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2019, in Oakland, Calif. Pacific Gas & Electric has cut power to more than half a million customers in Northern California hoping to prevent wildfires during dry, windy weather throughout the region. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)

Winds gusting as high as 70 mph in places were forecast to begin hitting Southern California later Thursday. Southern California Edison warned that it might cut power to nearly 174,000 customers in nine counties, including Los Angeles and its surrounding areas. San Diego Gas & Electric has notified about 30,000 customers they could lose power in back-country areas.

While many people said the blackouts were a necessity, others were outraged — the word that Gov. Gavin Newsom used in arguing that PG&E should have been working on making its power system sturdier and more weather-proof.

“They’re in bankruptcy due to their terrible management going back decades,” Newsom said in San Diego. “They’ve created these conditions. It was unnecessary.”

Singh said the utility has more than 8,000 employees and contractors who have been clearing brush, inspecting power lines and putting power lines underground.

But he said the power grid wasn’t built to withstand the changing weather and the previous safety factor “no longer exists.”

Although fire agencies had beefed up their crews because of red-flag conditions of extreme fire danger, very few fires were currently burning in California. Only a tiny fraction of acreage has burned, so far, this year compared with recent years, though no one has attributed that to the power cuts.

___

Melley reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Janie Har and Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco, Jocelyn Gecker in Moraga, Don Thompson in El Dorado Hills, Haven Daley in Oakland, and Christopher Weber and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

All contents © copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Topics

PG&E cuts power to prevent wildfires     By BRIAN MELLEY and TERENCE CHEA Associated Press SONOMA, Calif. (AP) — Millions of Californians played a waiting game with the winds Thursday as Pacific Gas & Electric watched the weather before deciding whether to restore power to an enormous portion of the state blacked out on […]

Get The Wildland Firefighter Newsletter

Related Articles

Ax Magazine Vol. 4 Is Out!

We are thrilled to announce the much-awaited release of the fourth edition of Ax Magazine! In this latest volume, we invite you to embark on an exciting journey with us as we explore intriguing stories, groundbreaking insights, and a celebration of our rich heritage...

Waterax Winner of the Innovation Award | SME 2023

Waterax Winner of the Innovation Award | SME 2023

The ADRIQ Innovation Awards 2023 shone on November 23 at the Palais des congrès de Montréal during the 33rd Innovation Awards Gala, bringing together over 575 participants. Under the dynamic leadership of Stéphane Bellavance, a distinguished personality in the...