Here’s why SMUD, PG&E are taking a while to restore power in parts of California
Extended power outages have continued into Thursday for tens of thousands of customers across Northern California, after the strongest of gusts Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning caused widespread damage to power equipment for both of the region’s major utility providers.
Restoring power for the hundreds of thousands of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers and tens of thousands of Sacramento Municipal Utility District customers has been a long and laborious process.
Even as the peak of the windstorm has passed, continuing severe weather — including snow that will fall even harder today across some of PG&E’s territory in the mountains and foothills — has slowed restoration efforts due to both the extent of damage and safety precautions that must be followed.
As of 2:30 p.m. Thursday, there were about 24,000 customers without power in PG&E’s Sacramento Division, which includes Yolo, Solano, Colusa, Sacramento, Yuba and Sutter counties.
Damage from wind and heavy rainfall, along with trees and debris blocking roads, was most severe in a few locations including Yolo County, said Megan McFarland, a PG&E spokeswoman.
Some of the major PG&E outages on Thursday included:
- Davis – 5,394 customers
- Dixon – 666 customers
- Fairfield – 2,017 customers
- West Sacramento – 3,878 customers
- Woodland – 6,871 customers
Hundreds of PG&E, contractor and mutual-aid electric and vegetation management crews were working “around the clock to restore service to customers,” McFarland said in a news release.
She also said PG&E has asked for mutual-aid support from other Western utilities, and some those crews have started to get to work. Twenty-five crews were out working with another eight crews expected to join them.
“PG&E is aware the hardship that extended outages represent and appreciates the patience of our customers,” according to Thursday’s news release.
PG&E officials said they will be contacting customers who were still without power due to storm-related outages, including automated phone calls with updated information.
PG&E expected that areas with damaged infrastructure and obstacles preventing access will have power restoration extended into Friday or possibly later than that. Customers will receive an estimated time of restoration for customers in areas where damage assessment has been completed, according to PG&E.
“The remaining customers will be contacted to let them know when we expect to have a troubleman or inspector in their area to assess the damage,” PG&E officials said in the news release.
As of 1 p.m. Thursday, more than 15,000 PG&E customers in Yolo County were without power; most of them were had gone without electricity for at least a day. Over 4,000 of those customers were expected to have their power restored later Thursday.
In Placer County, more than 1,000 PG&E customers were without power Thursday afternoon. Over 200 PG&E customers had not electricity Thursday afternoon in El Dorado County.
SMUD: ‘We can’t have ‘em up in buckets’
SMUD had about 7,000 customers who were without power across Sacramento County, according to its online outage map as of 3 p.m. Thursday. At the peak of the storm in Wednesday’s early hours, more than 150,000 lost power.
SMUD spokesman Chris Capra explained to The Bee the challenges of restoring power in a severe windstorm like this week’s in Sacramento.
For one, SMUD has to prioritize repairing live, fallen power lines that pose safety hazards before utility workers can shift focus to restoring power more broadly. When winds are as strong as they were Tuesday and Wednesday, there are many of these hazards and clearing all of them can take hours or more than a day.
Second, repair work can’t be done until the wind subsides. Capra said the utility has a rule against using crews in cherry pickers when the winds exceed 25 mph.
On Thursday, Capra said crews continued to work on restoring power to thousands of customers after dangerous wind gusts of up to 30 mph prevented overhead repair work overnight. Dangerous conditions delayed repairs over the past two days, which made difficult for crews to restore power to many quickly.
“We won’t do the work unless it’s safe,” Capra said.
Winds peaked well above 60 mph in the Sacramento area Tuesday night into early Wednesday morning, and continued to routinely exceed 25 mph later on Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service. Winds are calmer Thursday but could still gust up to about 24 mph, forecasts show.
Capra said crews encountered a lot of “twisted wreckage,” including cables wrapped around tree limbs. He said the distance between outage also can slow down crews, some involving a 40-minute drive before the repair work can continue.
Nearly 80 SMUD customers on Thursday had gone without electricity since Tuesday, according to data from SMUD’s online outage map. Capra said he couldn’t confirm those numbers Thursday, but he did say that extended outage is “not acceptable for any customer” and crews will continue to “work around-the-clock” to restore power for all customers.
PG&E: Hundreds of crews, some in deep snow
PG&E said in a Wednesday evening news release that about 575,000 customers lost power between Tuesday and 4 p.m. Wednesday, across its coverage area spanning parts of more than 30 counties.
The utility’s outage webpage showed about 83,000 homes and business still without power as of 9:30 a.m.
PG&E faces some of the same issues as SMUD but is also facing extreme snowfall in wide swaths of its coverage area, with 2 to 3 feet of snow in today’s forecast in some parts of the Sierra Nevada range and a NWS blizzard warning in place until 4 a.m. Friday.
More than a foot of snow already fell between Tuesday and Wednesday morning across much of the Sierra.
“More than 400 crews and nearly 500 electric troublemen and inspectors are working on restoration,” PG&E said in Wednesday evening’s update. “In some locations, PG&E has been using snowcats, truck-size tracked vehicles, to gain access to infrastructure in locations where snow is the deepest.”
This story was originally published January 28, 2021 at 10:28 AM.
