‘The wind toppled a lot of trees.’ Nearly 300 PG&E outages in Fresno area after storm

Nearly 5,000 PG&E customers were without power Tuesday morning in and around Fresno following a massive wind storm Monday that toppled trees, snarled traffic and created hazardous breathing conditions.

The outages were represented in hundreds of green and yellow dots on the utility company’s outage map.

On Tuesday morning, Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s Fresno Division was reporting 289 outages, affecting 4,626 customers, according to PG&E spokesman Denny Boyles.

Three of those were public safety shutoff outages, which PG&E had announced as a possible precautionary measure Monday morning. Those outages were affecting 188 customers in the Coalinga area. Power was expected to be restored to those outages around 10 p.m. Tuesday.

The remaining outages were storm-related, Boyles said.

“The wind toppled a lot of trees and broke off a lot of branches, everywhere. Some of them blew into our lines.”

The majority of the outages were small, affecting less than 50 customers, though there were two large outages east of Fresno in Squaw Valley and Auberry.

In each, power was out for about 800 customers, Boyles said.

The sensitivity of PG&E’s equipment in those area is adjusted to turn off quickly if any issues are detected, Boyles said. These Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings are in place “due to high risk of fire in those areas,” and can prolong outages.

“We have to locate and repair the damage that caused the outage, then patrol that entire circuit to look for other potential issues before we can restore power,” Boyles said.

Gusty winds pushed fires, destroyed air quality

PG&E customer weren’t the only ones affected by Monday’s wind storm.

The Big Fresno Fair called off its scheduled horse races because of an unhealthy air quality index “for the safety of our horses and jockeys,” Fair Deputy Manager II Lauri King said in a news release.

The AQI in Fresno on Monday was at least 225, well above the 150 level at which fair staff had determined it was safe for the horses and jockeys to compete.

Fire crews also battled the wind as a pair of fires burned just outside of Fresno. One was in an area along Tollhouse Road between Shepherd Avenue and the Friant Kern Canal. The second, a grass fire near Highway 99 in Madera, prompted an evacuation order.

“There is an immediate threat to life,” the sheriff’s office said.

Both fires were brought under control Monday evening.

This story was originally published October 12, 2021 at 9:53 AM.