PG&E announces public safety power shutoff for the North Bay

SAN FRANCISCO (AP/KTVU) - After another day of scorching hot weather where the lights mostly stayed on in the North Bay, PG&E made the decision Tuesday evening to initiate a public safety power shutoff that will affect up to 48,200 customers in the North Bay and Sierra Foothills, officials confirmed. 

At around 7:30 p.m., officials announced they'd enforce the safety measure going into effect at approximately 2:30 a.m. Wednesday in the Sierra Foothills and at approximately 4:30 a.m. in the North Bay, following a lengthy assessment of wind and temperature conditions. Those windy conditions are expected to last until 12 p.m. Wednesday afternoon.   

You can find more information on the outages from PG&E here. 

The outages will impact 701 customers in Sonoma County in Santa Rosa, as well as 708 customers in the areas of the west side of Calistoga, Lake Berryessa and the city of Napa in Napa County. 

Throughout the state, there are 3.8 million customers under a red flag warning. For parts of the Bay Area, the warning is in effect until 11 a.m. on Wednesday. %INLINE%

"There's still is the potential for another weather system moving in Tuesday night. So, people may be contacted again," said PG&E spokesperson Deanna Contreras.

Residents braced themselves. 

"We're set up for the power failure, we've got a generator and I picked up gas today," said Walt Johnson, who lives on Loch Haven Drive, off Mark West Springs Road. His property is on the edge of the Tubbs Fire of October 2017. "It burned to the fence line, you can still see the bulldozer line firefighters put in," said Johnson, who has invested in both a generator and a pump, to draw water from the swimming pool, should fire return.  

His wife said this time of year is worrisome for them.

"It's scary every time they say the wind's going to pick up at night, it's scary," said wife Pegeen Johnson. 

But both Johnsons said they understood why the power might be shut off.

"It sounds like they're ready to pull power, maybe Tuesday, and that's a good thing," Walt Johnson said. "And everybody's on alert and watchful, so that's comforting." 

In Marin, even though it's been a quarter century since the last major fire, and 70 years since a megafire, the Marin Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a measure to form a Wildfire Prevention Joint Powers Authority to look at every aspect of wild fire prevention.

"We want to get people out alive, first and foremost. We want to protect their home from fire second and third, we want to create a landscape that tolerates fire," said Marin County Fire District Chief Jason Weber.

Marin's 19 fire jurisdictions have to agree and come back to the supervisors by Nov. 5.

"Really this is a holistic approach to wild land fire prevention. So, it's not just vegetation management. It's about hardening the homes and the structures. It's about creating defensible space. It's about improving evacuation routes. It's about improving evacuation systems, notification systems," said Chief Weber.

A ballot measure must be submitted by Dec. 6 for the March ballot where homeowners will be asked to pay 10 cents per square foot on their residence; an average tax of about $200 a year on homes, $75 per unit for apartment owners.

"It's a modest amount for a large, large investment and when you pool everybody together, you can do a lot more," said the Chief.

Not everyone was spared the "Public Safety Power Shutoff," a new PG&E attempt to shut off power during high fire season.

The utility did cut power to 24,000 northern customers in  Butte, Nevada and Yuba counties in the Sierra Nevada foothills on Monday evening. 

The power will remain off until conditions are safer, and PG&E warned that it might expand the precautionary outages on Tuesday to El Dorado, Placer, Sutter, Lake, Napa and Sonoma counties if gusty winds and hot, dry weather continue.

Butte County is where a wildfire blamed on PG&E transmission lines killed 86 people last year and virtually leveled the town of Paradise.

Meanwhile, Southern California Edison warned it might shut off power to 41,000 customers due to forecasts calling for gusty Santa Ana winds.

The cuts could affect Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

Strong winds, low humidity and warm temperatures were forecast in the state through Wednesday, and authorities issued an extreme fire danger warning for some areas.

Wind gusts could reach 50 mph (80 kph) in the northern Sierra and foothills, and between 30 to 40 mph (48 to 64 kph) in the Sacramento Valley and near the Pacific coast, said Eric Kurth, a forecaster with the National Weather Service.

"Humidity levels are dropping, and winds are picking up," Kurth said. "The main threat is overnight when the winds pick up in the mountains and foothills."

Some of the most destructive blazes in the state in the past two years were started by PG&E power lines. Winds can knock down live wires and power poles or drive trees and other vegetation into contact with them.

PG&E first cut off power preemptively last October, affecting some 87,000 customers. The move prompted complaints and demands for reimbursement.

But the utility canceled plans to shut off power ahead of the deadly Nov. 8 blaze that started near Paradise.

An investigation by Cal Fire said transmission lines owned and operated by the utility started the fire that wiped out nearly 15,000 homes.

California regulators in May approved allowing utilities to cut off electricity to avoid catastrophic wildfires but said utilities must do a better job ramping up preventive efforts and educating and notifying the public, particularly people with disabilities and others who are vulnerable.

In January, PG&E sought bankruptcy protection, saying it could not afford an estimated $30 billion in potential damages from lawsuits stemming from catastrophic wildfires.

Earlier this month, PG&E agreed to pay $11 billion to insurance companies holding 85% of the claims from fires that include the Paradise blaze.

The settlement, confirmed Monday, is subject to bankruptcy court approval.

It's important for PG&E to pull itself from bankruptcy protection because it will be a big part of a wildfire fund set up to help California's major utilities pay future claims as climate change makes wildfires more frequent and severe.

With all this hot weather, some officials worry people might tune out PG&E warnings if they're in too much flux.  

"I'm a little concerned about confusion and there is probably some frustration," said Santa Rosa Deputy Fire Chief Scott Westrope. "We don't want people to throw up their hands and go 'it's not going to happen' and then not prepare for it."  
 

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Associated Press writers Olga Rodriguez and Juliet Williams in San Francisco and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this report.