No relief as heat wave lingers
Marin County’s heat wave continued Monday with more power outages, lightning strikes and a new vegetation fire in the Point Reyes National Seashore.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said more than 5,100 meters in Tiburon lost power during a midmorning outage. Power was returned to all but 176 meters by 1 p.m.
In West Marin, the utility reported an outage affecting 2,083 meters in Point Reyes Station, Olema and communities around Tomales Bay. Another outage, which was linked to a fallen power line, cut service to 1,629 meters in the area of Stinson Beach and Bolinas.
In Novato, an equipment failure at the Ignacio substation cut power at about 6 a.m. for approximately 900 customers in Novato, Petaluma and Sonoma. PG&E investigators suspected a lightning strike caused the outage.
A separate outage along Novato Boulevard was attributed to a fault in the power line. The outage 53 affected meters, said Deanna Contreras, a spokeswoman for the utility.
An outage in Mill Valley’s Blithedale Canyon neighborhood affected 683 customers.
A 17-acre fire sparked by lightning Sunday on Mount Barnabe in West Marin continued to burn Monday, but the fire department said it had stopped the spread. It was one of eight fires ignited by lightning in the county on Sunday.
During the storm on Monday, another fire burned about 2 acres in the Point Reyes National Seashore. No evacuations were ordered and no structures threatened, according to the Marin County Fire Department.
National Weather Service forecaster Cindy Palmer said there were roughly 200 lightning strikes throughout Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties on
Monday.
The surprise storm system broke off from Tropical Storm Fausto to bring the region rare thunderstorms to couple with a high-pressure system that has enveloped the West Coast in a record-setting heat wave.
While the thunderstorms were anticipated to dissipate Monday, the heat wave was here to stay through at least midweek, Palmer said.
High temperatures in Marin on Monday included 95 degrees in San Rafael and Ignacio, 92 degrees in Kentfield and 92 on Mount Tamalpais.
County officials opened a cooling center at the Marin Center Exhibit Hall in San Rafael. About 10 people used the center on Saturday and Sunday, said Laine Hendricks, a county spokesperson.
With heat advisories in effect through the week, PG&E is warning of possible rolling outages through Wednesday in order to prevent overtaxing the power grid. If the utility does intentionally initiate outages, they will happen between 3 and 10 p.m. and last no longer than a few hours, said Contreras, the utility representative.