PG& E’ s history with black outs signaled trouble
SAN FRANCISCO >> The state senators grilling the CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. were upset, just like millions of other Californians who spent days in the dark when the nation’s largest utility shut off power during windstorms this fall.
The lawmakers demanded that the executive explain why blackouts intended to prevent downed power lines from sparking deadly wildfires caused so much trouble of their own.
The explanation CEO Bill Johnson offered the Capitol hearing room: Several smaller outages that PG&E triggered in the year before its debacle began in mid
October went well, giving his company misplaced confidence.
“I think we got a little complacent that we had figured it out,” Johnson testified last month.
PG&E had not figured it out.
An Associated Press review shows widespread problems with the four “public safety power shutoffs” the utility started rolling out in 2018, a year before massive blackouts paralyzed much of California in recent months. Interviews and documents obtained under public records requests reveal persistent failures and broken promises that in some cases compromised public safety.
Even as PG&E assured regulators it was fixing the problems, the utility kept making many of the same mistakes, further undermining trust after its outdated equipment and negligence has been blamed for fires that killed nearly 130 people during 2017 and 2018.
Communication, a foundation of emergency management, was poor. PG&E’s notifications of impending outages were haphazard at times, with some sent after the power was already out. Telecommunications companies, water providers and emergency managers did not always receive the early word they needed.
“We were surprised that PG&E provided no advanced warning to us,” an official with the city of Oroville’s drinking water provider wrote state regulators about a June outage.
PG&E made important information hard to get. It was slow to distribute electronic maps showing who would lose power, making it harder for emergency responders to know exactly where to send resources. The utility also balked at providing the addresses of medically needy customers to local officials who planned to check on them in person.
Breakdowns afflicted even basic technology. In a region that’s home to Silicon Valley and its thousands of computer programmers and engineers, PG&E had not prepared the website where it posted outage updates for a crush of customers, so it crashed. Tech experts from the state had to intervene.
The sound quality of some calls PG&E hosted during shut-offs was so poor that emergency responders and legislators had a hard time understanding updates. Even then, not everyone was invited.
“In the future, AT&T requests that it and other communications providers be included on any conference calls providing real time information,” the telecommunications giant protested to regulators after the June shut-off.
These and other early failures weren’t widely recognized as harbingers of the issues that would overwhelm PG&E come mid-October, partly because the outages affected rural areas with less political and economic clout.
While the headlinemaking shut-offs affected more than 2 million people across much of PG&E’s 70,000-square-mile service territory, the four initial blackouts affected tens of thousands in Northern California’s Sierra Nevada foothills and famed wine valleys. They hit in October 2018 and then in June, September and early October of this year.
Among those who saw trouble building were regulators at the California Public Utilities Commission.
The first shut-off was chaotic and the next three were not going according to the guidelines regulators had passed. Commission staff members met more frequently with PG&E starting in the spring, using advice and persuasion rather than mandating changes.
“We, as the state, never got to the point where we had complete confidence in PG&E’s ability to execute,” said Elizaveta Malashenko, the top California regulator overseeing blackouts.
Malashenko, deputy executive director of safety and enforcement policy, told the AP that the commission didn’t act more aggressively because it has to balance punitive intervention with giving utilities a chance to self-correct.
“There needs to be some basic operational assumption that you can set up a conference call,” Malashenko said.
Some critics faulted regulators for not doing enough.
The utilities commission, a sprawling bureaucracy with a complex rulemaking process, was “not aggressive enough early in setting clear requirements and standards,” said Melissa Kasnitz, legal director for the Center for Accessible Technology, which advocates for people with disabilities.
PG&E promised to fix a range of problems promptly, and an executive said it worked hard to deliver.
In many ways, that didn’t happen. Not only did the problems continue throughout the smaller shut-offs, but they were replicated on a huge scale starting with the mid-October shut-offs.
The problems galled local officials, who vented deep frustration that a utility they often work closely with kept failing them.
After all, they are the ones dealing with a shutoff’s consequences. They must dispatch ambulances, run jails and water plants, direct traffic through darkened intersections, set up community shelters and much more.
“It’s almost as if it’s intentional disregard of all the warnings we gave them,” said Napa County Supervisor Diane Dillon, whose district north of San Francisco has experienced nearly every shut-off.
Sixteen million people — more than the population of nearly any U.S. state — depend on PG&E for power. The shut-offs were an inconvenience for some and extremely costly for others. For society’s most frail, they brought questions of life and death.
Those who rely on medical devices in their homes were particularly vulnerable.
“PG&E did nothing to help us who depend on electricity to run our life support,” recounted Grace Lin, a polio survivor who needs a ventilator to breathe and uses an electric wheelchair. “It’s not like we could simply grind our teeth and tough it out by holding our breath.”
Lin said she was confused by the notifications PG&E sent ahead of the first shut-off that affected her Bay Area home on Oct. 9. The company website they referred to for updates was frozen. Lin considered herself lucky that she had the means to evacuate 20 miles away, to a quadriplegic friend’s house that had electricity.
PG&E could identify “medical baseline” customers such as Lin based on billing records. Local officials working to identify everyone who might need help repeatedly asked PG&E to share its list, so no one was overlooked.
Regulators said PG&E promised it would release medical baseline addresses during a shut-off. Yet when each of the first four hit, PG&E insisted that locals sign a legal agreement not to disclose the addresses, causing delay and uncertainty that regulators said could risk lives.
On the eve of the first massive power outage, Malashenko of the utilities commission was urgently emailing company officials in frustration.
“This issue has been discussed many times over the last several months” yet “has once again become an issue with PG&E,” she wrote on Oct. 8.
The utility now has a market value of about $6 billion — a drop of $30 billion in just over two years — and is working with the state and a federal judge to emerge from bankruptcy by June 30.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said he expects PG&E’s entire 14-member board of directors, including Johnson, its CEO, to step down before the state will approve the utility’s plan to regain its financial footing.
Power shut-offs are likely to be a feature of life in California for years to come. PG&E must invest billions in infrastructure upgrades, and communities are spreading into lands once populated by trees and brush.
Regulators promise to be watching closely.
“If we have an outcome that doesn’t meet the public expectation and what we need to run as a state,” Malashenko said, “that means that we need to rethink our approach and try something different and drive to a better outcome.”