California Utility Shuts Off Power Due to Wildfire Threat

Pacific Gas and Electric began turning off power Wednesday afternoon to some 180,000 customers in parts of 17 California counties, due to a high wildfire threat.

More than 125,000 PG&E customers were without power as of 4 p.m. CST, according to poweroutage.us. A PG&E outage map showed that most of those were due to the preemptive shutoffs.

The shutdowns comes less than two weeks after millions of Californians were plunged into darkness for days by a similar series of precautionary outages.

The latest outages will affect portions of the Sierra Foothills and North Bay, as well as small parts of San Mateo and Kern counties, the utility said in a press release Wednesday morning.

Counties impacted include: Alpine, Amador, Butte, Calaveras, El Dorado, Kern, Lake, Mendocino, Napa, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, San Mateo, Sierra, Sonoma, Tehama and Yuba.

The shutoffs had been expected to begin around 2 p.m. PDT in the Sierra Foothills, 3 p.m. in the North Bay counties, and approximately 1 a.m. Thursday in affected areas of San Mateo and Kern counties.

Pacific Gas & Electric began notifying customers on Monday about possible outages this week. That means as many as a half-million people could lose electricity. The shut-offs would last at least 48 hours, the utility said.

Southern California Edison was considering shutting off electricity to more than 300,000 customers in seven counties, according to the company's website. The utility had previously announced a far smaller possible outage.

The PG&E blackout will be far less extensive than the one that affected more than 738,000 customers in 30 counties on Oct. 9 and lasted until Oct. 12 in some areas.

he National Weather Service has issued red flag warnings across large parts of Northern and Southern California, as low humidity and gusty downslope/offshore winds will boost fire danger over the next couple of days.

The worst conditions are predicted Wednesday into Thursday from parts of the Bay Area into the northern Sierra Nevada foothills, and early Thursday into Friday afternoon across coastal Southern California and the adjacent mountains.

In Southern California, the weather service is predicting a moderate to strong Santa Ana wind event. Wind gusts could reach 65 mph in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. The National Weather Service has issued an "extremely critical" fire-weather designation, the highest alert level, for Thursday.

"This could be one of our most critical weeks of the fall season for fire weather due to very warm temperatures and bouts of Santa Ana winds," the NWS said in a statement.

Fires can start when high winds blow down power lines or when falling tree limbs or other vegetation come into contact with the lines.

PG&E equipment has been blamed for sparking some of California's deadliest and most destructive fires in recent years. Facing lawsuits and claims that could run into the billions, the utility filed for bankruptcy.

Residents expressed frustration and resignation as news of the latest round of power outages spread.

Garrett Sanders, owner of Love Birds Coffee & Tea in the old Gold Rush town of Placerville, told the Associated Press he lost about $6,000 in the last outage, a huge amount of money for a mom-and-pop business. Sanders said they were still trying to recover from the financial hit.

He plans to brew coffee and stock up on handmade pastries to sell on the sidewalk during this week's outage.

"It's going to be a sober morning for people waking up without their coffee," Sanders said.

A dozen people moved to Placerville after they were displaced by the wildfire that devastated the town of Paradise last year.

"Of course, none of us wants the devastation" of a wildfire, Sanders said, "but I think the measures that PG&E is taking are to the ultimate extreme."

Kim Schefer, who manages Village True Value Hardware in Santa Rosa, spent Tuesday directing customers to gas cans and batteries. She said residents had an attitude of acceptance toward the upcoming outages.

“I think it’s not panic per se, just, ‘Eh, we gotta do this again?’” Schefer told USA Today.

The California Public Utilities Commission summoned PG&E to an emergency meeting Friday to discuss problems that arose during the blackouts earlier this month. The utility’s website crashed, the Los Angeles Times reported, and customers could not reach PG&E for information.

With some 2 million people without electricity, businesses and schools closed. Many people lost cell phone service, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Company officials promised to set up a special website that can accommodate high volumes of traffic, according to the Chronicle. They also said they were working to strengthen coordination with government agencies.

Still, a top PG&E executive has warned that outages could continue to happen for another decade until the utility can put measures in place to prevent its equipment from sparking fires.