Shutoffs: New PG&E warning as millions go without power
Millions of Californians had no power Sunday as Pacific Gas and Electric Co. implemented its largestever blackout to prevent wildfires during a fierce windstorm.
Some people may be without electricity for days longer, because even as PG&E predicted calmer weather throughout its service area by Monday, it also issued an ominous warning about another wind event that may prompt more shutoffs just one day later.
PG&E said it would try to restore as many customers as possible before the next round of extreme weather arrives Tuesday and again raises the risk that power lines could ignite a deadly wildfire. But the company conceded that it may not be able to bring electricity back for everyone in time.
“I would ask everyone to make sure you’re prepared for
the potential that your power may not be restored,” said PG&E President and CEO Andy Vesey, who urged people who have their power restored between events to recharge medical equipment, phones and other electronic devices and restock emergency kits.
That means some subset of the up to 2.8 million people whom PG&E started cutting power to Saturday could continue to have no electricity until at least Wednesday — and possibly longer. PG&E must visually inspect its power lines through vehicles, helicopter and foot patrols before bringing them back online, all while looking for damage that needs to be fixed.
PG&E had not yet decided Sunday whether it would proceed with the next round of blackouts. If implemented, the shutoffs beginning Tuesday could affect between 520,000 and 640,000 customers in parts of 32 counties, all of which were part of the weekend outages as well.
It would be the fourth time PG&E turned off electricity because of fire risk in just one month.
After the company’s equipment started a series of disastrous conflagrations in 2017 and 2018, some have acknowledged that PG&E may need to take extreme measures to prevent another catastrophe.
And yet skepticism, frustration and alarm abounds as California’s largest electric utility repeatedly asks customers to go without electricity for an extended period of time.
“It's really hard to get an understanding of it,” said Andy Kruse of Orinda while shopping at the blackedout Cole Hardware store in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood Sunday. “PG&E is doing everything they can but stuff happens. You wonder, is it climate change or PG&E mismanagement?”
PG&E turned off the store’s electricity on Saturday night. On Sunday, employees escorted customers around the dark store with flashlights. Cash registers were being powered by generators but everything else — the lights, woodcutting equipment and key copiers — was suspended.
Similar scenes of disruption played out across the Bay Area. Shoppers were turned away from a Trader Joe’s near the Oakland hardware store by a sign on the door that read “Closed. We have no power.”
At UC Berkeley, administrators decided to cancel daytime classes on Monday because of the blackouts.
Should the campus cancel more classes because of power outages, students worry that they will lose their “dead week” that occurs between classes and finals because professors would need to make up instruction time.
“If this keeps happening, there wouldn’t be any study time before finals; we would just go straight from classes to finals,” said Cleo Wienbar, a senior studying political economy, who was sitting at a table in the eerily deserted Sproul Plaza on Sunday.
The scene was the most stark in the North Bay, where the dangerous Kincade Fire is burning in northern Sonoma County. As the weekend windstorm fueled the fire’s growth, more than 95,000 homes and businesses in the county also lost power because PG&E was worried about trees or branch