PG&E shutoffs reach El Dorado — 225K of possible 361K customers in wildfire safety outage

With Northern California facing the most dangerous windstorm of 2020, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. began shutting power to 361,000 homes and businesses Sunday as severe red flag warnings took effect and wildfire risks picked up.

The latest PG&E wildfire safety blackout got under way as fierce, dry Diablo winds swept across much of California, beginning at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley and sweeping south into the Bay Area, raising the danger of more large wildfires. Portions of the Sacramento area, including El Dorado County, were getting blacked out, too.

The blackout began Sunday morning, with customers in Shasta, Tehama, Glenn, Colusa and Lake counties being the first to lose power. By 6 p.m., about 225,000 customers were affected, and the remaining 136,000 customers were due to go dark by midnight, said PG&E incident commander Mark Quinlan.

PG&E meteorologist Scott Strenfel said “an ultra-dry air mass” was washing over much of the Sacramento Valley, Sierra foothills and the Bay Area. Wind gusts of 53 mph and above were already recorded, and Strenfel said the most dangerous winds were coming late Sunday night. In some areas, meanwhile, humidity levels had fallen to 5%.

“This is shaping up as a critical fire weather day,” he said.

Winds were expected to subside by midday Monday in much of the blackout area, although it could take another 12 hours to inspect the equipment for wind damage and switch the lights back in. Some customers won’t get power restored until Tuesday.

With the National Weather Service forecasting Diablo wind gusts as high as 70 mph in parts of the Sierra foothills, the first wave of shutoffs hit 20,000 customers in Nevada County, and thousands more in Yuba, El Dorado, Amador, Calaveras, Plumas, Solano, Sierra and Tuolumne counties.

All told, about 60,000 homes and businesses on the fringes of the Sacramento area were expected to go dark by Sunday night. Significant portions of the Bay Area and regions as far north as Mendocino County were also blacked out.

Once the latest shutoff is over, Strenfel said Diablo winds are expected to die down for at least seven to 10 days. But he noted that wildfire dangers persisted into November last year, and more blackouts could be in the offing because of the lack of rainfall.

“We don’t get any rain — any time we get these dry offshore winds, we could be back in these public safety power shutoffs,” the PG&E meteorologist said.

The blackout area included portions of Butte County — a frequent target of PG&E’s wildfire-safety blackouts and the site of the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest in California history. PG&E pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges in the Camp Fire after investigators found it was ignited by a faulty transmission tower.

The public safety power shutoff is the fifth of the year engineered by PG&E and by far the largest, conjuring up memories of the series of massive blackouts the utility imposed last October. However, the 361,000 customers expected to lose power represented a decrease from the original estimate of 466,000, thanks to revised weather forecasts, and were only about half as many as the big blackouts that occurred a year ago.

The latest blackout affected parts of 36 counties across PG&E’s territory. The 361,000 customers amounted to as many as 800,000 individuals. PG&E said it was opening 106 community resource centers for customers to charge their cell phones and get snacks.

PG&E’s reduction in the blackout was largely due to favorable changes in the weather forecast, sparing 105,000 customers originally expected to lose electricity. For example, in Santa Rosa, where the Tubbs Fire destroyed entire neighborhoods three years ago, fewer than 2,000 customers were blacked out, down from the original estimate of 15,000.

Residents around the Sacramento region, including about 38,000 in El Dorado County, 17,000 in Placer County, 4,600 in Yuba County and 165 in Yolo County, were among those who faced interruption.

Nevada County was preparing for the largest outage among the 36 counties, with about 40,500 customers potentially facing the shutoff.

Homes and businesses in Sacramento County and Roseville, which are served by other utilities such as SMUD, are not part of the planned outage.

Southern California Edison said it was considering safety outages for 75,000 customers in six counties: Kern, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties. San Diego Gas & Electric said it was contemplating shutoffs, too.

Wildfire damages drove PG&E into bankruptcy in early 2019, following the wine country fires of 2017 and the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest in California history. The utility exited bankruptcy this summer but faces enormous pressure to avoid causing more wildfires.

Last fall it was blamed for the Kincade Fire in Sonoma County, which was ignited by a transmission line that remained active even while that area was under a public safety blackout. The company has told investors that liabilities from Kincade could reach $600 million.

This year, the company is under investigation in connection with the Zogg Fire, which killed four people in Shasta County last month.

The past four years have brought some of the most destructive and deadliest wildfires in the state’s modern history. This year alone, more than 4 million acres have burned, the most in modern history.

Nearly 180 people died in wildfires since 2017. More than 41,000 structures have been destroyed and nearly 7 million acres have burned. That’s roughly the size of Massachusetts.

This story was originally published October 25, 2020 at 12:23 PM with the headline "PG&E shutoffs reach El Dorado — 225K of possible 361K customers in wildfire safety outage."