More than 10,000 lose power in storms

More than 10,000 Bay Area Pacific Gas & Electric Co. customers were without power on Monday afternoon, the utility company said.

The North Bay was hardest hit with 4,288 without power, followed by the South Bay Bay with just over 3,273. The East Bay had 2,435. Outages in San Francisco fluctuated sharply. There were only five outages reported at 9 a.m. and 849 at 11 a.m. At 3:35 p.m. it was back down to six. In all there were 10,286 residential and commercial customers lacking electricity at 3:45 p.m. The majority of the North Bay outages were in Lake County.

The outages were due to a combination of Monday's and Sunday's storms, on top of holdovers from the major windstorm of Feb. 21, which caused downed lines and killed power for more than 1 million PG&E customers, 400,000 in the Bay Area alone.

Over the last week, PG&E spokespersons said the company replaced 1,746 broken power poles and 900 transformers. In the Bay Area, 200 broken power poles and more than 100 damaged transformers have been replaced.

“This new weather system, especially the strong winds, is knocking trees or limbs down and into power lines — breaking power poles, transformers, wires and other electric components,” said PG&E spokesperson Mayra Tostado. There are 431 repair crews out working in combination with Caltrans crews and the California Highway Patrol, she said.

Hardest hit in last week's storm was the Peninsula, where some 50,000 customers were mostly without power from Tuesday until Friday night. It was not known how many of those were still without power one week later and how many were new outages.