San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Potentially historic’ winds bearing down
Saturday. The company does not expect that process to begin until Monday morning in most places, after winds subside.
The planned outages are shaping up to be unprecedented in scope — larger even than the controversial PG&E shutoffs that affected more than 2 million people earlier this month. Blackouts are set to extend from the far North Coast and the northern Sacramento Valley down into the Sierra Nevada foothills, throughout much of the Bay Area and in parts of the Salinas Valley and Kern County.
In the North Bay, where the Kincade Fire is raging in northeastern Sonoma County, the impact will be acute. Much of Sonoma County is subjected to the shutoffs, and in neighboring Marin County, officials said they expected virtually every customer to lose power.
PG&E officials said the latest round of outages was necessitated by a highly dangerous weather forecast that anticipated wind gusts up to 70 or 80 mph in some places. The company said conditions could be worse than those that fueled October 2017’s devastating North Bay wildfires — most of which the state found were caused by PG&E power lines.
“Let me be very clear: We don’t do this because it’s the easy thing for us to do,” PG&E’s Vesey told reporters. “We do it because it’s the safe and right thing to do. “
This is the third time in one month — and the second time in one week — that PG&E has asked many of its customers to go without electricity. The company’s blackout strategy has provoked widespread outrage from customers, higher scrutiny from regulators and intense criticism from lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“These are difficult calls,” Newsom said at a news conference in Napa. “But a society as industrious and entrepreneurial and innovative as ours should not have to face a choice between public safety and public blackouts. We can do both together. And that is what path
When will the lights come back on?
If your electricity goes off, it could be restored within a day or two, but be prepared for the outage to last up to a week, PG&E spokesman Paul Doherty said.
After the windy weather passes — in this case, probably Monday at 8 a.m. for most of the Bay Area, PG&E said Saturday — inspectors have to assess every line before turning power back on in each area, and they may find hazards or damage. PG&E said it would have to inspect 30,000 miles of line. Officials said the company would use 42 aircraft to conduct aerial inspections.
Check pge.com/pspsupdates for more information. we are on.”
Over the next few years, the governor said, “I think we will see substantial improvements” in PG&E’s ability to focus its preventive outages. Bill Johnson, chief executive of the utility’s parent PG&E Corp., has told state regulators that the company is working to improve its system so the blackouts are eventually unnecessary, but they may continue at some level for a decade.
The outages have a pronounced effect for people who need electricity for medical reasons.
Sitting at St. Vincent’s Bridge to Housing shelter in San Rafael, Toni Vazquez said that when she heard she could lose power for days, she worried how she would breathe.
“I was really scared,” Vazquez said.
In her hand was a plastic mask with a tube leading to a nebulizer she uses every morning, sometimes more, for asthma and other breathing conditions.
To endure the power outage, she got a backup battery from Suzanne Walker, deputy director of the shelter. Vazquez, who has lived in the shelter for three months, bought two lanterns and a foam cooler to save her favorite peanut butter chocolate ice cream.
“As long as I can call 911, run this machine” — she motioned to the nebulizer — “and eat a little bit, I’m fine,” she said.
PG&E is scrambling to prevent the weekend’s expected winds from damaging its lines and sparking fires. The company may have already failed to do so during an earlier power outage it started Wednesday, when some of PG&E’s highvoltage electric equipment broke near the time and place that the Kincade Fire ignited.
Firefighters in Sonoma County were trying to increase containment on that fire before the high winds blew in. But officials, fearing the worst, ordered about 90,000 people to flee — including the entire communities of Healdsburg, Windsor, Geyserville, Guerneville and Forestville.
Mandatory evacuations were in place from the fire zone in the Mayacamas Mountains outside Geyserville to Highway 101 and all the way west to the Sonoma Coast — suggesting that emergency responders think the Kincade Fire might make a run toward the Pacific Ocean.
“The next 72 hours will be challenging,” Newsom said. “I could sugarcoat it, but I will not.”
PG&E is implementing the blackouts in several phases depending on how it expects the weather to shift.
The first outages started Saturday at 5 p.m., PG&E said, affecting customers in the northern Sierra foothills and northern Sacramento Valley. Beginning at 8 p.m., PG&E turned off power to parts of the East and South Bay — in Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties — as well as parts of San Mateo, San Benito, Santa Cruz, Monterey and Stanislaus counties. Customers in Lake, Humboldt, Siskiyou, Trinity and northern Mendocino counties were set to start losing power at 9 p.m., and at midnight PG&E planned shutoffs to reach parts of Alpine, Calaveras, Mariposa and Tuolomne counties.
PG&E won’t start cutting electricity in Kern County until 9 p.m. Sunday. The company said in a statement Saturday evening that its blackouts would also cover “portions of Fresno and Madera Counties, additional customers in Mariposa County and Yosemite National Park.” But PG&E did not initially specify how many would be impacted in those locations or say exactly when the lights would go out.
At the Chiarruci house in Moraga, a gaggle of children screamed and chanted from a hot tub as the power cut shortly after 8 p.m., said Karen Chiarucci.
The family bought a generator after the first outage earlier this month. Chiarucci joined the local Community Emergency Response Team and is taking classes. On Saturday night, they lit candles, fired up flashlights and lit a solar lantern in their living room, as well as freezing individual water bottles.
“In Moraga, I’m not worried, but I do feel we’re sitting ducks. We have zero power, no lights, if you were to leave your home, anyone could come enter our house,” she said.