Power restored, anger lingers

PG&E: Many complain about utility’s bad communication leading up to safety blackouts

With the lights back on and schools reopened, the Bay Area headed into the weekend having avoided the catastrophe many predicted when PG&E announced its unprecedented move to preemptively shut down power to 800,000 customers across much of Northern California.

But while the outages were far less lengthy than PG&E had anticipated, many were angry that the utility’s lack of preparation and communication had paralyzed the region as thousands struggled to get information from PG&E’s broken website and local officials desperately played catch-up with rapidly changing information from the embattled utility.

Most schools were back in session Wednesday, after a roller coaster of decision-making in which officials were left to make last-minute decisions about whether to close, or stay open and risk having to manage classrooms full of students left in the dark.

At the West Contra Costa Unified School District, officials decided to keep schools open Wednesday, even though some were scheduled to lose power at noon. The district planned to send students home if an outage occurred before noon, and keep them if it occurred afterward.

At 9:45 a.m., with morning classes underway, PG&E sent the district a text and automated phone call, warning that the shutdown was “imminent.” The district then sent a message tell

ing parents that they could come to pick up their children. Contra Costa County did not lose power until after 9 p.m.

“It was a challenging situation all the way around,” said district spokesman Marcus Walton. “This was the first time we had gone through it. Everyone would have liked more accurate information and more lead time leading up to the shutdown. I would say that we did not receive notice when the power came back up.”

In East San Jose, Mayra Mejia, 19, left work at Ross on Wednesday to look after her parents in case power was shut off. Family members were unsure about school closings, so they drove their children to their school in case it was open. It was not.

“We were really concerned about the kids,” Mejia said. “It was a lot of back and forth.”

Confusion over whether the Caldecott Tunnel would close Wednesday reflected the consternation that gripped the Bay Area this week, as hundreds of thousands of residents waited for the blackouts that were expected to begin rolling out after midnight but kept getting delayed throughout a mostly windless day.

It took PG&E and Caltrans — two agencies that have worn villain tags over the years — a good chunk of Tuesday to concoct a plan to keep one of the region’s main east-west commuter arteries open.

Sen. Steve Glazer, whose district includes the Caldecott Tunnel, said he was notified at 5 p.m. Tuesday that the tunnels might close later that evening. At 6:50 p.m., his office sent an email notification to 180,000 District 7 residents.

“Then it cascaded from we have no power to we may have no power then a notification later in the evening that they thought it was likely they could keep it open,” a frustrated Glazer recalled. “It put all of us who were trying to help in communication handcuffs.”

“The notification of a closure was shockingly bad,” Glazer said.

The communication issues were compounded by persistent issues with PG&E’s website, which crashed at 9:30 a.m. and remained down for hours, sending error messages that ranged from a timeout request to a warning that the site was attempting to steal information.

Although PG&E had doubled its database capacity, it wasn’t enough to handle the 800% increase in traffic to the site, spokesperson Karly Hernandez said. Eventually, PG&E set up an alternative site, but that too promptly crashed after launching Wednesday.

The utility tried again. Three separate times on Wednesday, PG&E tweeted out links to the alternative site, hosted by a third-party called ArcGIS StoryMaps, but each time, users immediately pointed out that site didn’t work, either. Rather than apologizing, the utility deleted the tweets altogether, spawning another wave of online vitriol.

At a news conference Thursday night, the utility’s CEO, Bill Johnson, acknowledged the technological troubles as part of a larger lack of preparedness.

“Our website crashed several times, our maps are inconsistent and perhaps incorrect; our call centers overloaded,” Johnson said. “To put it simply, we were not adequately prepared to support this operational event.”

In San Jose, Mayor Sam Liccardo had just arrived in the Netherlands on Tuesday evening, to receive a reward for the city’s work to mitigate climate change, when he learned of the shutdown. He scrambled to return to San Jose, landing at 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, in “time to get to emergency operations center for the first report of a blackout,” he said.

He acknowledged to this news organization that he has his “own feelings” about oversight of the utility giant at the state level and said “there’s plenty about this to create justifiable frustration,” but added that the city had been able to work successfully with PG&E to deal with the outages.

Around the region, public safety agencies reported no major incidents or casualties as a result of the outages. But many business owners and residents affected said the shutdown and the days of mixed messages that preceded it had left them frustrated and scared.

Kevin Wong, the owner of Orinda Chiropractic & Laser Center in Orinda, said the biggest headache this week came from managing electronic payments and scheduling with no computers. He scaled back on staff because he could not accept electronic payments or schedule appointments on the computer.

While Johnson, the PG&E CEO, defended the preventative outages as “a choice here between hardship on everyone and safety,” many residents, including Wong, have remained skeptical of the utility.

“You can say, ‘You should have a generator.’ No, I shouldn’t have a generator when I pay money every day to have PG&E support my electricity,” Wong said. “If this was a natural disaster like an earthquake or a tsunami, I get that. But this is something that is manmade — they are creating this on us and this is something that a lot of us believe is unnecessary.”

East San Jose residents on Friday described days of lost work, scrambled schedules to care for family and young children, and worry about future blackouts. Diana Segovia, 57, manages a family livestock ranch, Dario’s Ranch, in the East San Jose foothills.

They need power to run their business and care for the scores of sheep, goats, lamb and pigs. With only a few hours warning from PG&E, the family pumped tanks full of water, fueled up their generators and waited for the cutoff. When their lights cut off around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, the 10 family members on the ranch navigated their homes with flashlights and battery-powered candles.

“Not happy,” Segovia said. But, she added, “When you have a business, you have to make it work.”

Segovia turned away three customers during the daylong blackout. She expected worse. She’s looking into buying more generators and doesn’t trust her power company.

“They really need to get their act together,” she said.

Dolores Lichtenwalter, a recently retired nurse from San Jose, had fretted over a potential power cut. Her husband, Richard, is in poor health, using an electric chair to get around and an oxygen machine to assist his breathing.

The couple is on PG&E’s medical emergency list, she said. Her backup plan was to “pray that the power doesn’t go out,” she said. It didn’t, but she was still left unhappy with the utility.

But, she added, “What are you going to do? They’re our power company.”