With power off, locals, visitors try to make do
In the tiny Sierra foothills community of Nevada City, Melissa Madigan, 49, laid out her “first day of school” outfit: slacks, a nice blouse, a necklace.
Wednesday was to be her first day as the superintendent and principal of Twin Ridges Elementary School District. The district, with 95 students, has two buildings, including a oneroom schoolhouse dating to the Gold Rush, where five students attend class.
Madigan planned to greet the children as they got off the morning bus and join them in the cafeteria for a hot breakfast. But those plans were made before Pacific Gas & Electric Co. began to preemptively cut power to more than 800,000 customers. Her district was one of them.
“It truly was a crazy first day of school,” she said. “I didn’t get to greet the students — I guess I will as soon as the power comes back on!”
Like so many others across the state, Madigan was inconvenienced in small ways and big by the outages, which were designed to stop power lines from potentially sparking blazes amid high winds and may extend into next week.
Some coped easily with PG&E’s action, which shifted the fireprevention burden from the company to its customers, while others worried how much it would cost and how long it would last. Most pressed were people with medical conditions requiring electricity.
Some businesses closed, while others — including event venues in Napa Valley and beyond — prepared for the prospect of canceling weekend weddings and parties. Many people got mad, mostly at PG&E for turning their lives upside down.
In Santa Rosa, the rabbis and parishioners at Congregation Shomrei Torah were recovering from a panic that had begun Tuesday night as Yom Kippur — the holiest day of the Jewish year — neared. Wednesday was to be spent in solemn services, followed by a day of fasting and a traditional meal at sundown. All of that would be ruined without electricity.
Sure enough, the temple’s power got cut. But a minor miracle arrived in the form of Drew Weissman, a congregant who also happens to be an electrician.
He scrambled to rent a 25kilowatt generator, spending the small hours of the night hooking the thing up, powering basic lights and the temple’s sound system. The generator couldn’t juice the big refrigerators, though, so he and other congregants bought dry ice to preserve the food.
The freezers were packed with challah, lox, bagels and other staples for the “break the fast” meal at the end of Yom Kippur. On Wednesday, a relieved crowd of several hundred congregants chanted prayers and sang songs in Hebrew. Weissman happily participated.
He took a moment to show the hookup he rigged into the electrical system, a massive cable that only an electrician could wrangle.
“It was absolutely important to get this done, this being the most holy day of the year,” Weissman said. “You’re starting over. And the last thing you want is to worry about this outage.”
The temple had been preparing for the High Holy Day since May. As for the utility company, Weissman was skeptical.
“PG&E? It really feels like they’re just trying to make a point,” he said, waving an arm at the landscape. “Because the winds now, they’re nothing. Maybe they could have waited or done something different.”
In Mill Valley, Spencer Rushton served drinks to two desperate hikers near Mount Tamalpais. Luckily, they had cash. The credit card machines were down.
Rushton, the manager of the Mountain Home Inn, peered off the deck, which overlooks Richardson Bay, and tried to detect the wind that PG&E said it feared would grow through Wednesday.
“There is not one tree moving, not even a little bit of wind,” he said. “I guess, after the Tubbs Fire, you have to be safe, but I’m wondering if they jumped the gun on this. We’re going to lose thousands of dollars.”
The Mountain Home Inn boasts rooms that go for up to $400 a night. But Rushton had to close the inn after the power and hot water went out. Unable to notify one guest —a visitor from Australia — Rushton said he would accommodate him, providing he didn’t mind the lack of amenities.
But he couldn’t help Frank Romano, 50, and Eileen Lyons, 46, of New York. They had arrived at the Mountain Home Inn looking for a meal. Earlier, they had been turned away from Muir Woods National Monument, which was closed to visitors.
From the inn, they called their Napa resort to see if their reservations for that night would be honored.
“I’m kind of disappointed,” Romano said. “It’s kind of absurd. It seems like overkill. We spent weeks booking all this stuff. We’ve got vineyards planned and restaurants, golfing and touring. We have a limo van rented for 10 people. It’s definitely going to affect business in this area. PG&E should be responsible for that.”
Lyons shook her head at their fast disintegrating vacation plans and said, “You know what? I am sure it could be worse.” And it could. Lisa Mast was one of those people who knew what “worse” looked like. On Wednesday, tension hung in the air in the areas struck by the North Bay wildfires of 2017. Mast’s house was on the very edge of the catastrophe. It narrowly escaped the Tubbs Fire that incinerated the Coffey Park neighborhood in Santa Rosa.
The anticipation of the outage was “hellacious, with a lot of triggers,” Mast said. “The wind feels the same. The area, the sense of unease, is the same. I’ve been thinking I’ve been getting better, but maybe I’m not. I started having major panic attacks.”
Mast said the whole community seemed to feel the eerie similarities between Wednesday and the devastatingly windy October evening of two years ago. At a commemoration for the Wine Country fires last Sunday at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, she was surprised to see five tables set up with people to help survivors with posttraumatic stress disorder.
“I’m glad they’re finally recognizing the PTSD,” she said. “I think I’m through the worst of mine, but I think a lot of other people are just getting to addressing it.”
Some of the triggers, Mast said, included seeing gas stations jammed with cars, suffused with a sense of disorder. No one respected lines. People left with armfuls of bagged ice and batteries. Everyone seemed to be in a slight level of panic.
Mast couldn’t immediately reach her daughter on the phone. It was all too reminiscent.
Back in Nevada County, Superintendent Madigan spent the first morning of her first day of work in a threehour meeting. There was no enjoying her first day back in the education world after two years off — she had traveled internationally with her 17yearold daughter, a professional biathlete. Madigan canceled classes at 5:30 a.m.
By 9 a.m., she was sitting with the district’s insurance provider in their office building in Auburn. It was dark, the lights not working.
“We are a very remote site,” Madigan said. “Many of our students are on free or reduced lunch. We only have so many snow days built into our calendar. Depending on how long the power is out, we may have to revisit this. We’re meeting with PG&E to figure it out.”
Lizzie Johnson, Kevin Fagan, Peter Fimrite and Dominic Fracassa are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: ljohnson@sfchronicle.com, kfagan@sfchronicle.com, pfimrite@sfchronicle.com, dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LizzieJohnsonnn @KevinChron @pfimrite @DominicFracassa