The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Nearly 2 million lose power in shutdown; winds move south
Gusts topping 70 mph raked the San Francisco Bay Area early Thursday after California’s biggest utility shut off electricity to nearly 2 million people for fear high winds in the forecast could bring down power lines and spark deadly wildfires.
The fire danger that led Pacific Gas & Electric to turn out the lights over a large section of northern and central California was expected to shift south as raging winds moved down the state. Major utilities in Los Angeles and San Diego warned they could be forced to cut off power to an estimated half-million people.
Unprecedented in scope, the deliberate outages that started early Wednesday forced schools and businesses to close and otherwise disrupted life for many people, bringing criticism down on PG&E from the governor and ordinary customers alike.
PG&E cast the blackouts as a matter of public safety, aimed at preventing the kind of blazes that have killed scores of people over the past couple of years and run up tens of billions of dollars in claims that drove the utility into bankruptcy.
The shut-offs could be just a glimpse of what lies ahead for California as climate change contributes to more ferocious blazes and longer fire seasons.
“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. But she added: “If it saves a life, I’m not going to complain about it.”
On Wednesday, PG&E cut power to millions in an area that spanned the Bay Area, the wine country north of San Francisco, the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills, where a November wildfire blamed on PG&E transmission lines killed 85 people and all but incinerated the town of Paradise. The city of San Francisco itself was not in the shut-off zone.
The shut-offs did not eliminate fires altogether: An overnight blaze in the blacked-out East Bay town of Moraga, population 16,000, prompted authorities to evacuate an upscale development of about 100 homes. Many people gathered in a Safeway parking lot in the middle of the night until they could see the flames were out.
By Thursday, PG&E had restored power to some areas, reducing the number of people in the dark to about 1.5 million.