SONOMA, Calif. (AP) — Millions of Californians
played a waiting game with the winds Thursday as Pacific Gas &
Electric watched the weather before deciding whether to restore power to
an enormous portion of the state blacked out on purpose.
The
state’s largest utility pulled the plug to prevent a repeat of the past
two years when wind-blown power lines sparked deadly wildfires that
destroyed thousands of homes.
The unpopular
move that disrupted daily life — prompted by forecasts calling for dry,
gusty weather — came after catastrophic fires sent PG&E into
bankruptcy and forced it to take more aggressive steps to prevent
blazes.
The
blackouts began Wednesday, hitting more than 500,000 homes and
businesses north of San Francisco Bay, in the wine country, the Central
Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills, where a November wildfire blamed
on PG&E transmission lines killed 85 people and virtually
incinerated the town of Paradise.
Late
Wednesday night, after a full day of delays, PG&E began cutting
power in the Bay Area, excluding the city of San Francisco.
Overall,
about 734,000 customers and as many as 2 million people could be
affected. PG&E has warned that they might have to do without
power for days after the winds subside because “every inch” of the power
system must be inspected by helicopters and thousands of groundworkers
and declared safe before the grid is reactivated.
“It’s just kind of scary. It feels worse than
Y2K. We don’t know how long,” Tianna Pasche of Oakland said before her
area was powered down. “My two kids, their school situation keeps moving
every second. It’s not clear if we need to pack for a week and go out
of town or what to do. So I’m just trying to make sure we have water,
food, charging stations and gas.”
“For me,
this is a major inconvenience in my life as a parent but also, if it
saves a life, I’m not going to complain about it,” she said.
Residents
of the Oakland Hills, where a wildfire in 1991 killed 25 people and
destroyed thousands of homes, spent the morning buying bottled water,
getting cash and filling their cars with gas.
In
the northern wine country, most of downtown Sonoma was pitch black when
Joseph Pokorski, a retiree, showed up for his morning ritual of
drinking coffee, followed by beer and cocktails.
The
Town Square bar was open and lit by lanterns, but coffee was out of the
question and only cash was accepted. Pokorski decided to forgo a
30-minute wait for a cup of joe from the bakery next door and move on to
beers and a couple greyhound cocktails of vodka and grapefruit juice.
“I’m not a coffee freak,” Pokorski said. “I can take it or leave. It’s no big thing.”
In
the El Dorado Hills east of Sacramento, California, Ruth Self and her
son were taking an outage in stride while leaving a Safeway grocery
store that had been stripped nearly bare of bottled water and ice.
Self
said she wasn’t upset, given the lives lost nearly a year ago in
Paradise, invoking images of people who burned in their cars trying to
escape.
“I just can’t imagine,” she said.
“Hopefully (the outages) are only for a couple days. I think it’s more
of a positive than a negative. Ask me again on Friday night when I
haven’t had a shower in two days, when I’ve had to spend two days
playing card games.”
There was some good
news. PG&E also announced that by reconfiguring its power
system, it had restored electricity to 44,000 customers who weren’t in
areas of high fire risk, and it could bring back power to 60,000 to
80,000 customers in the Humboldt area, where gusty winds had subsided.
Also
because of shifting forecasts, the utility said it was reducing the
third phase of its blackout plan, set to begin Thursday, to only about
4,600 customers in Kern County — one-tenth of the original estimate.
Unsurprisingly,
the unprecedented blackouts sparked anger. A customer threw eggs at a
PG&E office in Oroville. A PG&E truck was hit by a
bullet that shattered a window in Colusa County before Wednesday’s
outages, although authorities couldn’t immediately say whether it was
targeted. PG&E put up barricades around its San Francisco
headquarters.
“We realize and understand the
impact and the hardship” from the outages, said Sumeet Singh, head of
PG&E’s Community Wildfire Safety Program. But he urged people
not to take it out on PG&E workers.
“They
have families that live in your communities, they have friends, they
are members of your communities,” he said. “They’re doing this work in
the interest of your safety.”
PG&E
took drastic action because of hot, dry Diablo winds sweeping into
Northern California, said Scott Strenfel, PG&E’s principal
meteorologist. They were also part of a California-wide weather system
that will produce Santa Ana winds in the south in the next day or so, he
said.
“These (weather) events historically
are the events that cause the most destructive wildfires in California
history,” Strenfel said.
Winds gusting as
high as 70 mph in places were forecast to begin hitting Southern
California later Thursday. Southern California Edison warned that it
might cut power to nearly 174,000 customers in nine counties, including
Los Angeles and its surrounding areas. San Diego Gas & Electric
has notified about 30,000 customers they could lose power in
back-country areas.
While many people said
the blackouts were a necessity, others were outraged — the word that
Gov. Gavin Newsom used in arguing that PG&E should have been
working on making its power system sturdier and more weather-proof.
“They’re
in bankruptcy due to their terrible management going back decades,”
Newsom said in San Diego. “They’ve created these conditions. It was
unnecessary.”
Singh said the utility has
more than 8,000 employees and contractors who have been clearing brush,
inspecting power lines and putting power lines underground.
But he said the power grid wasn’t built to withstand the changing weather and the previous safety factor “no longer exists.”
Although
fire agencies had beefed up their crews because of red-flag conditions
of extreme fire danger, very few fires were currently burning in
California. Only a tiny fraction of acreage has burned, so far, this
year compared with recent years, though no one has attributed that to
the power cuts.
___
Melley
reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Janie Har and Olga
Rodriguez in San Francisco, Jocelyn Gecker in Moraga, Don Thompson in El
Dorado Hills, Haven Daley in Oakland, and Christopher Weber and John
Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this story.
