Large areas of Northern California remained without power Thursday as a major outage rocked the region for a second day. About 600,000 electricity customers were affected Thursday morning after the state’s largest utility carried out the second phase of its intentional power cut.
Pacific Gas and Electric said extreme winds overnight forced the additional shutdown, which the utility organized to prevent equipment from sparking fires.
The second phase affected bedroom communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and added to the hundreds of thousands of customers who had lost power on Wednesday. As of Thursday morning, the company had restored power to 137,000 customers.
But other customers may be without electricity for several more days, said Melissa Subbotin, a spokeswoman for the company. High winds in some areas were not forecast to subside until Friday, she said.
A fire after midnight Thursday in the town of Moraga, home to St. Mary’s College, prompted evacuations and burned around 50 acres but was brought under control before dawn.
Pacific Gas and Electric says it will deploy a fleet of helicopters and more than 6,000 technicians to inspect the lines before they are brought back on, a process that could take up to five days.
‘This isn’t the end of this.’
When Ben Faus went to sleep Wednesday night at his home in the foothills above the Monterey Bay, he knew there was a chance his power would go out. About 3 a.m., when he was jolted awake because his electric sleep apnea breathing machine stopped working, he knew the blackout had arrived. “All of a sudden, I was like, ‘I can’t breathe,’” he said.
Faus, 74, is a retired pharmacist who has lived with his wife in the Central Coast town of Aptos for three decades. On a cold and clear Thursday morning, they were among tens of thousands of residents in Santa Cruz County, as well as large metro areas in San Jose and Oakland, who woke up to a blackout as part of PG&E;’s fire-precaution plan.
In a region where officials this week issued a red-flag fire warning for the Santa Cruz Mountains, Faus said he appreciated the effort to prevent sparks but the utility was not doing enough to keep residents informed of when and how long power would be turned off. “I can see the reason they’re gun-shy, but I think they’re overdoing it,” Faus said. “I almost feel like they’re trying to show people just how vital they are.”
Outside a Safeway grocery store just after dawn Thursday, dead traffic lights caused backups. Commuters toting travel mugs from homes without power begrudgingly got back into their cars without coffee when security guards informed them the store would open late.
While many residents said they had received emails or calls warning them that PG&E; may cut power this week, most said they had trouble getting access to online maps and were unaware after a day of delays on Wednesday if the shut-off would actually happen.
Beth O’Shaughnessy and her family of four lost power at their Larkin Valley home with 13 horses, dogs and other pets around 11 p.m. Wednesday night. Though the family has a generator for winter storms in the mountains, they had held off on stocking up food because of the uncertain timeline and long lines for fuel. “We weren’t sure if we would be able to get gas, so we didn’t want to get too much stuff,” she said. “One thing at a time, one meal. I’m kind of keeping that in the back of my head.”
Gayle Clark, a 69-year-old Air Force veteran, watched the commotion outside the grocery store with interest as he walked his brown Doberman. Clark, an electrical contractor who said he has worked for utilities elsewhere in the state, has for the past five months lived in a trailer with a generator after he was unable to find a landlord willing to accept a subsidized housing voucher. For as long as California’s fire problem endures, he expects similar scenes in the future. “This isn’t the end of this,” Clark said. “This is the beginning.”
The economic losses are only starting to be tallied.
Michael Wara lost power at his home in Mill Valley at 2 a.m. Wednesday. He has no hot water, internet connection or cellular service.
“We’re camping in a very nice tent called our house,” he said.
But shortly before his lights went off, Wara, a climate and energy expert at Stanford University, got to work calculating the potential impact of the outage on the California economy. Using a statistical model developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Wara estimated that the disruption could cost the state as much as $2.5 billion. Or as little as $65 million.
The long-term economic damage will depend on a range of factors, experts say, from the blackout’s duration to the number of major businesses affected. Whatever the outcome, the outage will probably make only a small dent in California’s multitrillion-dollar economy.
“It’s a manageable loss,” Wara said. “It’s definitely a lot smaller than the losses that have been caused by wildfires in Northern California over the last couple of years.”
For now, however, that may be little comfort to hotels that have had to cancel reservations or restaurants where refrigeration has stopped.
“Restaurants aren’t running and businesses aren’t running, so obviously commerce isn’t happening,” said Christopher Thornberg, a founding partner at the research and consulting firm Beacon Economics. “There’s going to be some loss in terms of food spoilage.”
But for many companies, Thornberg said, “it’s not business canceled, just business delayed.”
And for some, the blackout even represents a business opportunity.
CD & Power, a company that sells generators in Northern California, has seen an uptick in sales and rentals, said Lisa Carter, the general manager.
Usually, she said, the company sells a few Honda generators a month. In the last two days, it has sold 13 and has exhausted its rental inventory. “We are buried this morning dispatching equipment,” Carter said.
“As many people as we’re helping, we’re having to tell many no, because there’s physically no equipment,” she said.
— David Yaffe-Bellany
UC Berkeley canceled classes and focused on protecting research and lab animals.
Classes were canceled on Thursday at the University of California, Berkeley, which was running on emergency power. But some staff members scrambled to preserve critical research work from harm as they worried about keeping laboratory animals safe.
Although faculty members, students and nonessential staff generally were asked to stay home, some researchers were asked to report to work in case any animals needed to be relocated.
Officials said major research equipment had been shut down, including research computing and sensitive instrumentation. Some refrigeration units containing samples had been moved to the University of California, San Francisco. A satellite launch scheduled for Thursday evening was scheduled to go forward as planned under generator power.
“The campus’ highest research priority is to protect our research animals, then our experimental specimens, and finally our reagents,” Randy Howard Katz, vice chancellor for research, said in a statement.
Katz called the power shutdown “enormously disruptive” to the university’s research activities, and said the university was calculating the cost in lost research time and lost or damaged experimental materials.
PG&E; shut down power to the campus after midnight Thursday, when it began running on battery backup, generators and, in some cases, Berkeley’s small co-generation power facility.
Classes were first canceled Wednesday in anticipation of the power outage, and students were told to charge their cellphones and other electronic devices. Residence halls were open, but many of them were without power, said a university spokeswoman.
As the weather improved on Thursday, senior campus leaders began considering restoring normal operations on Friday. But by the afternoon, no decision had been announced.
— Anemona Hartocollis
Many in Northern California had harsh words for PG&E.;
Citing a weather forecast ideal for wildfires and staring down billions in potential liabilities from past blazes, PG&E; decided sparks from its electrical equipment or a downed power line would pose a greater risk than grumbling customers.
But some residents and state officials felt the utility had overstepped.
State Sen. Bill Dodd, a Democrat who represents northern counties of the Bay Area, said the situation was “beyond frustrating” in a statement on his website. “Public safety power shut-offs have a role to play when they’re needed to prevent massive wildfires,” he said. “However, many of my constituents are disturbed that the power was shut down before the winds started to pick up in the North Bay.”
“Sadly, poor performance by PG&E; is par for the course, so it’s not surprising,” he added.
One police department poked fun at the utility’s less-than-ideal rollout, which included problems with its website and early maps that left some residents confused about whether they would be affected. The department, in Pleasanton, California, posted a fake outage map on Facebook, with the entire state scribbled out in red.
“Remain calm,” the post read. “Use your cellphone light to search frantically for the one flashlight you think you have in the house. It will be dead of course. Search for batteries.”
Others did not appear to share their sense of humor. California Highway Patrol said that it was investigating a report that a PG&E; vehicle had been shot at in Colusa County, north of Sacramento.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that residents in the blackout areas had a right to be “outraged.”
But he stopped short of criticizing PG&E.; “This is industry best practice,” he said of the decision to cut electricity. “This is just at a scale that we haven’t seen.”
The governor, who was speaking with reporters, said the state needed to do everything it could to avoid a recurrence of last year’s Camp Fire, which killed 86 people.
There are still weeks left in fire season, he said. “Remember, we are in the peak of it.”
This article originally appeared in
.