PG&E launches blackouts as Diablo winds fan wildfire risks in Northern California
PG&E Corp. began blacking out thousands of California homes and businesses as strong winds kicked up Wednesday evening, its third deliberate wildfire-safety power outage in a little over a month.
With dangerous winds picking up and hot, dry weather covering much of Northern California, the state’s largest utility said nearly 53,000 homes and businesses would get blacked out by the end of the evening, mostly in the Sierra foothills and parts of the Bay Area. The first homes to get blacked out lost power at around 6 p.m., utility spokeswoman Lynsey Paulo said.
The blackouts began shortly before the manager of the state’s power grid, hoping to avert a repeat of August’s rolling blackouts, issued a flex alert for Thursday afternoon — a voluntary call for conservation as unseasonably warm weather settles in across much of California. The rolling blackouts occurred during a horrific heat wave, boosting demand and straining supplies.
The grid manager — the Independent System Operator — also issued a “restricted maintenance operations” notice, directing generators and other suppliers to defer routine maintenance and keep more electricity flowing.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s “public safety power shutoffs” are blackouts, too, but have nothing to do with the availability of power supplies. Rather, they’re imposed when fierce winds raise the danger of a wildfire.
The latest shutoff, covering parts of 24 counties, was expected to last until late Friday night.
The shutoff came amid a “red flag” warning from the National Weather Service, which forecast elevated fire risk and Diablo winds as high as 50 mph. Scott Strenfel, a PG&E meteorologist, said some Bay Area mountain peaks could see gusts of 70 mph.
Diablo winds “bring more dry air into our territory and suck the moisture out of our vegetation,” Strenfel said.
The blackouts were expected to hit the following counties: Alameda, Amador, Butte, Calaveras, Contra Costa, El Dorado, Humboldt, Lake, Monterey, Napa, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Shasta, Sierra, Solano, Sonoma, Tehama, Trinity, Yolo and Yuba.
PG&E said practically all of the affected customers would lose power by around 8 p.m. Wednesday, although a few hundred in Amador, Calaveras, Humboldt and Trinity counties wouldn’t get blacked out until Thursday afternoon.
The utility faces considerable pressure from state officials to prevent more wildfires. Billions of dollars in damages from the wine country fires of 2017 and the 2018 Camp Fire drove the company into bankruptcy in early 2019.
PG&E is out of bankruptcy but not out of danger — it is facing liabilities estimated at $600 million from last fall’s Kincade Fire in Sonoma County, which state investigators say was caused by a faulty, active transmission line even though the area was already under a deliberate safety blackout.
This year, during the worst wildfire season in California history, PG&E is under investigation in connection with the Zogg Fire, which killed four people in Shasta County last month.
After infuriating Gov. Gavin Newsom last fall, when a series of shutoffs left hundreds of thousands of Californians without power, the company has deployed “sectionalizing” technology and other systems to reduce the footprint of this year’s blackouts. Those systems reduced the size of the latest blackout by about 12,000 customers who otherwise would have lost power, said PG&E incident commander Mark Quinlan.
PG&E said 3,100 customers would lose power in the latest shutoff in Paradise, the Butte County town that was largely destroyed by the Camp Fire. Other cities expected to get hit hard by the blackout included Oakland (5,000 customers), Calistoga (2,200 customers) and unincorporated areas of El Dorado County, where 1,600 customers faced shutoff.
PG&E said it had opened 37 community resource centers to help customers cope during the blackout; three more would open Thursday. The centers provide water, snacks, electricity for charging phones and other amenities.
PG&E said the winds were expected to die down early Friday, but it would take about 12 hours to inspect power lines and poles for damage before the electricity would come back on.