Update: PG&E cancels planned wildfire outages in Northern California, as weather shifts
Update: On Thursday morning, PG&E said the scope of the Public Safety Power Shutoffs would be reduced to all but Kern County due to changing conditions. The revision means no homes and businesses in Northern California would be taken offline.
“However, gusty winds in the Southern region of our service area could potentially prompt a PSPS impacting about 670 customers in Kern County,” said PG&E spokesperson Deanna Contreras. “Those customers have been notified that potential shutoffs could begin tonight around midnight.”
Original story:
PG&E Corp., still wrapping up a wildfire safety blackout that began earlier this week, is preparing to launch another outage across parts of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, Bay Area and Central Coast.
California’s largest utility announced late Tuesday it could start shutting power to 29,000 homes and businesses in 19 counties early Thursday.
In both cases, weather and climate are the driving force: PG&E blamed the drought, dry conditions and another windstorm in the forecast. The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for most of the day Thursday.
The new public safety power shutoff, or PSPS, would affect customers in parts of the following counties: Butte, Colusa, Contra Costa, Glenn, Kern, Lake, Napa, Plumas, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Shasta, Sierra, Solano, Sonoma, Stanislaus, Tehama, Trinity, Yolo and Yuba.
The warning came as PG&E was continuing to restore electricity to about 24,000 customers hit with a PSPS blackout that began Monday.
The PSPS outages reflect PG&E’s ongoing struggle to curb wildfire dangers. The utility is under investigation in this year’s Dixie Fire, the second largest wildfire in California’s history, and has been indicted on criminal charges in connection with last year’s fatal Zogg Fire in Shasta County and 2019’s Kincade Fire in Sonoma County.
The company emerged last year from bankruptcy protection, the result of a string of disasters capped by the November 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise.
This story was originally published October 13, 2021 at 8:19 AM.