PG&E declares more wildfire safety blackouts for Wednesday. Here’s where they’ll hit

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. planned to cut power to 37,000 homes and business in the Sierra foothills and Bay Area late Wednesday as “red flag” warnings of strong winds raised the risk of wildfires.

The “public safety power shutoff” would be the fourth imposed by PG&E across sections of Northern California in the past month and a half.

Citing high winds, low humidity and “severely dry vegetation,” the utility said blackouts would affect customers in Alameda, Butte, Colusa, Contra Costa, Glenn, Humboldt, Lake, Napa, Plumas, Santa Clara, Shasta, Sonoma, Tehama, Trinity, and Yolo counties.

The shutoffs are set to begin around 8 p.m.

PG&E initially said the blackout would strike 53,000 customers, but changes in the weather forecast enabled the utility to shrink the footprint. Still, the National Weather Service warned of wind gusts as high as 45 mph in parts of Northern California.

The blackouts would likely end sometime Friday.

PG&E remains under intense pressure to avert more large wildfires, and has been using the power shutoffs as a tool to reduce risk. Wildfire damages drove PG&E into bankruptcy in early 2019, and while it successfully exited bankruptcy this summer, the utility is under investigation in connection with the Zogg Fire, which killed four people last month in Shasta County.

The blackouts remain controversial, although PG&E has deployed microgrid technology and other systems to narrow the geographic scope. None of this year’s blackouts has been anywhere near as big as the power shutoffs PG&E imposed last October, when millions of Californians were left in the dark during a series of outages.

This story was originally published October 21, 2020 at 5:10 PM with the headline "PG&E declares more wildfire safety blackouts for Wednesday. Here’s where they’ll hit."