PG&E starts restoring power
But utility warns of another possible shutoff this weekend
As PG&E began restoring electricity Thursday to 179,000 customers in 17 counties, it warned that another Public Safety Power Shutoff — the third and biggest one so far this month — could come as soon as Saturday evening and stretch into Monday.
“We do think that it will be the strongest offshore wind event of the season by a large margin, and if models are correct, possibly the strongest offshore winds we’ve seen in years,” PG&E chief meteorologist Scott Strenfel said in a news conference Thursday evening.
Strenfel said the forecast currently calls for 40 to 60 mph gusts over “most of the elevated terrain of Northern California,” with peak gusts of 70 to 80 mph in isolated locations
Bill Johnson, president and CEO of PG& E, said the shutoff would likely occur in the San Francisco Peninsula, East Bay, North Bay, Central Coast, Sierra foothills and Humboldt County. It remains to be seen exactly how many customers would be impacted.
In an email, Contra Costa County Emergency Services Manager Rick Kovar said PG&E notified the county that 48,000 customers could be affected. And in Alameda County, the Sheriff’s Department tweeted that the utility warned that about 57,000 customers in the county could be affected.
The blackout that began Wednesday was the second time this month the beleaguered utility has shut off electricity as a precaution to prevent its equipment from sparking wildfires such as the ones in Northern California that have claimed scores of lives and destroyed thousands of homes in recent years. The first major power shutoff earlier this month affected 2 million people across the state.
Amid this latest shutoff, a fire broke out Wednesday night in Geyserville near an area where PG&E
cut off electricity to nearly 28,000 households. It has burned at least 10,000 acres so far.
In the Bay Area, the power outage wasn’t as widespread as last time and affected only portions of San Mateo, Napa and Sonoma counties.
In the rustic hamlet of La Honda between the Peninsula hills and the coast, residents and business owners coped with the blackout.
Ari Delay, chief of the La Honda Fire Brigade, said power went out at 1 a.m. Thursday just as PG&E had warned. Although the emergency response center was staffed beginning at 10 p.m. Wednesday, the fire department had not received any emergency calls or walk-ins, however, he said.
At the La Honda Country Store, the blinds were shuttered, and a lock hung on the front door. A whiteboard next to the entrance, which typically tells customers the special of the day, displayed the words “the store will not be open.”
A few doors down at the post office, employees worked with flashlights and headlamps, sorting mail and handing out packages to residents who dropped in.
And on top of a small hill above the downtown strip, teachers at La Honda Elementary School went about their planned lessons for the day. They opened their blinds and let the sunlight illuminate their classrooms; students used outdoor portable bathrooms and handwashing stations. Otherwise, there was “minimal to no impact” on students, Principal Liz Morgan said.
PG&E began inspecting power lines before restoring electricity Thursday to customers in all counties except Kern, where the dry, windy conditions are expected to continue until midday today.
Meanwhile, the company says it has fixed problems with its website that had caused many customers looking for information during its expansive shutdown earlier this month to encounter “failed to load” and error messages when they tried to load the PG&E website.
The utility’s website crashed multiple times, a persistent issue that the state’s Public Utilities Commission called a “major failure … during the most critical times” that “left Californians scrambling for information.”
As blackouts rolled out Wednesday evening, CEO Bill Johnson said at a news conference the company’s site is now “fully operational and working normally.”
PG&E has a “major social responsibility” to make sure people can access information about the shutoffs through multiple communication channels — especially when the utility is the reason the emergency is happening, said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.
“It’s preposterous to even make a statement that they didn’t anticipate so many people would go to the website,” Redlener added. “I don’t know what they were thinking or expecting, but shutting down power for 800,000 people, for them not to expect an enormous amount of traffic to their website really stretches their credibility here.”
Since the first major shutoff, the utility says it has increased memory and processing units in its data center, moved features of its website to the cloud so it’s easier to add capacity, and contracted with a company to make sure its website can handle sharp swings in web traffic.
PG&E spokesperson Tracy Lopez emphasized that the new website was only down briefly Tuesday and said the company has beefed up teams to monitor the site and ensure reliability.
“We were aware that customers were having trouble (Tuesday), but our teams worked on multiple fronts and with our third party providers to make sure it’s functioning quickly,” Lopez said, adding that the company began notifying customers by email, text and phone calls about the outage 48 hours in advance.
Still, many customers have complained that the company’s website isn’t updated frequently enough. When Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia tweeted late Thursday afternoon that the county had been notified of a planned blackout, the company had not updated its website to show what areas would be affected.
Some said they have received conflicting information.
“I’ve received two text messages from PG&E, one yesterday evening and another one just now about my power has or will be shutoff for a PSPS,” tweeted David Palinsky. “I go to the PSPS updates website and when I check my address, it says I’m not impacted. PG&E needs to do better.”
Reliable access and clear and accurate information is crucial during emergencies, said Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, deputy director of the NCDP, who said companies such as PG&E should see themselves as first responders, given the utility’s role as the sole provider of electricity for large parts of California.
“Although (the shutoffs) are not classified as a disaster, they’re putting people in positions where it’s disrupting life- sustaining equipment and connections, and the only thing you really have is time to prepare and adjust,” said Schlegelmilch. “It’s not just a question of customer service, but are they providing information to people that they need to stay healthy and, in extreme cases, to stay alive.”
Public communication should be a top priority for PG&E, he said.
“In this day and age, your web and social media presence is a majority component of how people seek information,” said Schlegelmilch. “It’s really important they are stable, and not confusing, and of course what we saw was the opposite of that.”
Ahmed Banafa, a professor at San Jose State University who lectures on cybersecurity and e-commerce, noted that retail websites often increase their bandwidth temporarily to make sure their website can handle heavy traffic, particularly during big sales like Black Friday.
“It’s all about resources, budget and planning,” said Banafa. “It’s something the retail industry learned the hard way, on days like Black Friday — it’s going to be better to be overcapacity with resources than to be undercapacity.”
One strategy is to create a mirror of a website, essentially recreating the content on a company’s main site in different locations, so that if the original website fails, visitors are redirected to a backup site. PG&E should also have been conducting stress tests to mimic traffic volume to see what its website could handle, Banafa said.
Banafa and Schlegelmilch both emphasized that most people won’t just check the website one time but might refresh and check the website multiple times a day, including those who aren’t slated to have their power shut off.
Lopez, the PG&E spokesperson, did not respond to questions about how exactly the company prepared its website ahead of the first major shutoff.
But, in an Oct. 17 letter to the CPUC, the company said it has since created backup sites and is “stress testing its website to accommodate 2.5 million users accessing the site in one hour.”
“I credit PG&E for learning their lesson, but they seem to be always behind the curve on this,” Schlegelmilch said.