PG&E restores electricity to all customers after Northern California shutoff
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. says it has restored power to all customers affected by Wednesday’s public safety shutoff as of late that night. Shortly before 1 p.m. Thursday, the company announced the restoration, which required visual safety inspections on about 2,785 miles of power lines.
PG&E shut off the power between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. Wednesday to 48,200 customers in portions of Napa, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Sonoma, Yuba and Butte counties. Power was restored to “essentially all customers” in all but Butte County as of 11:30 p.m., the utility company said in a news release overnight.
Butte County customers made up nearly 23,000 of the 48,200 total customers affected by Wednesday’s shutoff, which included parts of Oroville, Paradise, Chico and Bangor, according to an earlier statement by PG&E.
PG&E shut off the power twice this week, after announcing the possibility of a shutoff over the weekend. Weather forecasts predicted critical wildfire conditions – dry, gusty and hot weather – across much of Northern California from Monday through Wednesday evening, prompting the National Weather Service to issue a red flag warning for large portions of the Sacramento Valley, the Sierra Nevada foothills and the North Bay.
PG&E cut power to about 22,000 customers in portions of Nevada, Yuba and Butte counties Monday evening. As the utility began returning service to customers midday Tuesday, PG&E indicated that another shutdown could follow Tuesday evening. Changing weather forecasts pushed the start of that power shutoff event to early Wednesday morning, according to earlier statements by PG&E.
Many users in community groups on social media indicated that “most of Oroville” was in a blackout Wednesday.
“My husband lost out on an entire day of work and pay due to his store having no power in Oroville,” Yuba City resident Ashley Franklin told a Sacramento Bee reporter via Facebook message.
Several school districts across the seven affected counties closed their campuses Tuesday, Wednesday or both days due to the outage, including the Penn Valley, Chicago Park and Union Hill school districts in Nevada County; and Paradise Unified in Butte County.
This story was originally published September 26, 2019 at 7:48 AM.
