California faces historic power outage due to fire danger

SAN FRANCISCO» Two years to the day after some of the deadliest wildfires tore through northern California wine country, a utility announced Tuesday that it will shut off power to more than 800,000 customers in the largest preventive outage in state history — to try to prevent wildfires caused by faulty power lines.

With windy, dry weather in the forecast and warnings of extreme fire danger, Pacific Gas & Electric utility said it would start turning off power to 34 counties in northern and central California after midnight Wednesday.

The Southern California Edison utility website said more than 106,000 of its customers in parts of eight counties could face power cuts.

It may take “several days to fully restore power after the weather passes and safety inspections are completed,” Michael Lewis, senior vice president of PG&E’s electric operations, said in a news release.

The number of customers and counties affected includes an area of wine country north of San Francisco where several fires two years ago killed 44 people and destroyed thousands of homes.

San Francisco is the only county in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area where power will not be affected.

“We’re ready to go,” said Jaina French, a spokeswoman for the city of Napa. “We’re encouraging our community to be as prepared as possible.”

That outage will also affect portions of the agricultural Central Valley, the state’s northern and central coasts and the Sierra Nevada foothills where a November wildfire blamed on PG&E transmission lines killed 85 people and devastated the town of Paradise.

PG&E said it planned to update customers by text message and email to where and when the power would be cut off. Its website, where people could check whether their addresses would be affected, was down Tuesday afternoon after being overloaded with visitors.