More than 14,000 PG&E lose power for about an hour in Nevada County, no cause given
About 14,000 PG&E customers went without power for close to an hour Wednesday morning in the heart of Nevada County, a few miles away from a wildfire that’s burning largely uncontained.
The PG&E online outage map showed two patches of the greater Nevada City, Grass Valley and Alta Hill area combining for just over 14,000 homes and businesses losing power starting around 9:20 a.m. The outage was gone from the map by 10:30 a.m.
The Pacific Gas and Electric Co. website listed the cause of those outages as unknown, but it notes a separate outage that started two days earlier and continues to affect 1,000 customers just to the west was caused by the Jones Fire. That 675-acre fire continues to burn in the hills northwest of Grass Valley, along Highway 49 south of the South Yuba River, in steep terrain.
The fire damaged PG&E equipment in the Newtown area early Monday morning and remains inaccessible to utility crews, according to the utility’s outage map.
PG&E all week has urged its customers to conserve power, as the state’s grid operator, the California Independent System Operator, had to implement rolling blackouts Friday and Saturday including PG&E territory amid a record-setting heat wave. Hot weather continued, but PG&E and ISO managed to avoid blackouts Monday and Tuesday evenings. PG&E urged customers again Wednesday to continue to conserve energy, and be prepared in the event of rotating power outages.
The larger outage of 14,000 customers was also not listed as a public safety power shutoff.
It’s unclear as of Wednesday morning whether the roughly hour-long outage has any connection to grid issues or the nearby wildfire. No other details were immediately provided by PG&E.
This story was originally published August 19, 2020 at 10:49 AM.
