PG&E: Barricades protect workers at headquarters as customer anger flares
A new layer of chaos is surrounding Pacific Gas and Electric Co. this week as public outrage escalates over the utility’s unprecedented forced blackouts in parts of 34 California counties because of wildfire concerns.
PG&E, which is in bankruptcy protection due to past wildfires sparked by its equipment, has never before tried to prevent another disaster by cutting power to 750,000 customer accounts, a number that could represent millions of people. Many residents, business owners and public officials are furious about its decision to do so this week — even though the utility has long
warned it may take such a drastic measure during times of high fire risk.
“We’re dealing with a lousy set of choices here,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, DSan Rafael.
Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, has estimated that two days of power shutoffs to 800,000 PG&E customers — the maximum impact the utility originally planned before scaling it back — could deliver an economic blow of as much as $2.5 billion.
“This is PG&E deciding that they cannot operate their system safely during these dangerous intervals of time,” Wara said.
The outages — with long lines at gas stations and at least one city, Morgan Hill, declaring a curfew — have led to criticism that PG&E has turned parts of California, the world’s fifthlargest economy, into a Third World country. They also represent an acknowledgment from PG&E that it can no longer perform its core service: reliably delivering power to its customers.
Anger is so intense that PG&E officials erected a barricade Wednesday outside the utility’s headquarters in San Francisco’s Financial District — for “the safety of our employees,” according to company spokeswoman Ari Vanrenen.
California Highway Patrol officers are looking into shots fired at a PG&E vehicle in Colusa County as the employee was driving a marked truck Wednesday morning, authorities said.
PG&E is in bankruptcy protection because of disastrous infernos its infrastructure caused over the last two years, killing dozens of people and incinerating thousands of homes. The company’s power shutoff program has been controversial since it was first implemented in October 2018, when public officials expressed frustration at PG&E’s communications.
Blacking out customers is not PG&E’s only wildfireprevention strategy in an era when climate change is making fire conditions more severe.
The company has also been installing hundreds of weather stations and highdefinition cameras around its service territory. In just the last year, crews inspected nearly 750,000 PG&E power poles in or next to highfire threat areas — a process that unearthed thousands of problems. And PG&E is starting to install more resilient poles and covered power lines in high fire threat areas, with 100 miles completed so far, a company executive said Wednesday.
But PG&E is clearly falling short in critical areas.
This month, the company told a federal judge it was only 31% done with the enhanced treetrimming it planned to conduct around power lines this year. Vegetation colliding with power lines is a common cause of fires started by utility equipment — that’s exactly what happened in the North Bay two years ago.
Also, PG&E directed customers to its website for information about the power shutoffs, and the company expanded its server capacity to deal with the expected influx of visitors. The site slowed and crashed this week under the weight of what company officials said was seven to eight times its normal traffic.
PG&E then launched a totally separate site on Wednesday night to provide information about the outages — but the link the company originally shared led to an error message, leaving many customers frustrated. The company later provided a working link.
Sumeet Singh, the vice president in charge of PG&E’s community wildfire safety program, told reporters Wednesday that the company understands the disruptive nature of a huge power outage.
“We thank our customers and our communities for your patience,” he said. “This decision is all about public safety, which is our most important responsibility.”
Singh has said power shutoffs are implemented by PG&E “as a last resort” — a criterion required by the company’s primary regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission.
The commission passed new rules about power shutoffs in May and is in the process of developing more. But Loretta Lynch, a former commission president, thinks the agency needs to go much further than it is considering by greatly expanding support for solar and storage installations that can keep homeowners’ lights on, for example.
“Unfortunately, from my perspective, because of PG&E’s past negligence and corner cutting, we are now faced with widespread blackouts,” Lynch said. “We now need to fix that corner cutting and make things safe as fast as possible, looking at all other options we have — not just what the utilities want to do to us.”
To Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, this week’s shutoffs “brings into question” whether the commission should allow other companies to compete for PG&E’s franchise, he said.
“The management of PG&E really seems to be out of control,” Toney said. “They’re shifting the cost onto the ratepayers that have already paid billions of dollars to prevent wildfires. I can see why people are really upset.”
Sacramento may take further action. State Sen. Scott Wiener, DSan Francisco, who has proposed a bill to restrict shutoffs, said the state needs clear standards for when utilities can flip the switch. “The Wild West doesn’t work,” he said.
Huffman, whose North Coast district stretches from Marin County to the Oregon border and has been devastated by wildfires before, understands why PG&E does not want to cause any more deadly catastrophes like it did in 2017 and 2018.
Yet he is also among many Californians who are bristling at the widespread blackouts.
Once the mass outage this week passes, Huffman said he intends to ask PG&E some “pointed questions” to figure out whether the scope and duration of the shutoffs were truly necessary and how long such events could continue to occur.
“This is just a huge swath of California, and it seems like there ought to be a better way,” he said.
Chronicle staff writers Dustin Gardiner, Jason Fagone and Megan
Cassidy contributed to this report.