"This Is The Third World":
Up To 3 Million Californians
To Lose Power As PG&E
Begins "Unprecedented"
Blackouts
8 October, 2019
As
previewed last night, PG&E Corp., California's largest (bankrupt)
utility, began shutting off power Wednesday to an unprecedented 3
million people in Northern California in the face of hot, windy
weather that raises the risk of wildfires. While the high winds are
forecast to subside by late Thursday, the company will undertake
extensive inspections of its equipment before turning electricity
back on, meaning outages could persist into next week.
More
than 3 million people may be eventually affected, based on city
estimates and the average household size. The economic impact may
reach $2.6 billion.
The
company was scheduled to shut service to another 234,000 customers in
cities including Berkeley and Oakland at noon local time, but told
city and county officials that those cutoffs will instead start
Wednesday evening. Strong, dry winds that heighten the risk of
wildfires are picking up later than forecast, the company said.
PG&E’s
Wildfire Safety Operations Center in San Francisco
According
to Bloomberg,
never before have California utilities intentionally cut power to so
many people for their own safety - and never has a shutoff affected
such major metropolitan areas, even as the city of San Francisco and
Silicon Valley appear spared. The undertaking is key to fairly new
strategy by PG&E for preventing power lines from sparking another
deadly - and costly - conflagration.
The
shutoff was scheduled to occur in three phases, eventually affecting
almost 800,000 homes and businesses, including in the San Francisco
Bay Area and Napa County. The next phase will include parts of
Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, among
others. The utility will also turn off 21,800 customers in Mendocino
and Calaveras counties who didn’t lose power during the first
stage.
After
that, PG&E will weigh a third one for the southernmost portions
of its service area, affecting 42,000.
In
all, about 15% of the utility’s customers may go dark.
The
bankrupt Pacific Gas & Electric, which announced the deliberate
outage, is working to prevent a repeat of a catastrophe last November
in which faulty power lines it owned were determined to have sparked
California’s deadliest wildfire in modern history. California Gov.
Gavin Newsom said the “frustration that Californians feel as they
deal with the impacts of these power outages is warranted,” but
that safety was the main concern.
“The
biggest threat looks to be today and continuing into the day
tomorrow,” Marc Chenard, a senior branch forecaster with the U.S.
Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, said of the fire
risk.
Power
lines are seen against a smoky landscape last November near Pulga,
California, east of Paradise
“Our
first priority is to protect people and to ensure that communities
are safe,” the governor said in a statement.
In
last year’s inferno, 86 people died and a town called Paradise was
virtually destroyed. PG&E has been found responsible for dozens
of other wildfires in recent years, too. This is peak wildfire season
in California.
With
large portions of the San Francisco Bay area set to be affected -
including cities such as Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose - the
shutdowns are a test for a densely populated region that’s the hub
of the U.S. technology industry.
“Extremely
critical” fire conditions were expected in parts of Northern
California Wednesday, and in Southern California around Los Angeles
county Thursday, the National Weather Service said. PG&E said the
severe weather incident prompting its precautionary shutoffs — hot,
dry conditions and winds gusting at up to 70 mph (110 kph) — was
expected to last through mid-day Thursday in northern and central
California.
Near
Los Angeles, Edison International’s Southern California Edison
utility said it was also considering cutting power to almost 174,000
homes and businesses. Sempra Energy’s San Diego Gas & Electric
warned that it could shut power to about 30,000 customers within the
next two days.
Artist's
impression of a Los Angeles blackout
The
outages already affecting regions such as the Napa Valley wine
country could last up to a week in some places.
There
was some last minute good news: PG&E briefly put off the next
round of unprecedented blackouts across Northern California for a few
hours on Wednesday after weather forecasts took a turn for the
better. However, they were still expected to kick in later in the
day.
While
the city of San Francisco is not affected by the intentional shutoff
- after all the locals have to be able to see when they are about to
walk into human shit - much of the surrounding Bay Area could go
dark, including parts of Silicon Valley.
A
prolonged outage threatens to roil the region’s economy by
disrupting workers and everyday life.
“If
you lose power for five hours, you may have to throw out some milk,”
said Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program
at Stanford University. “If you lose power for five days, you need
to throw anything that’s perishable away, and you are likely eating
out of a can.”
Officials
in Malibu — the glitzy home to Hollywood stars, which was also
struck by last year’s inferno — said power company Southern
California Edison had warned of another possible shutoff in areas
from late Thursday through Friday.
More
than 100,000 customers could lose power across eight Southern
California counties, SCE said.
Schools
and universities closed Wednesday and people stocked up on gasoline,
water, batteries and other basics.
“Early
indicators are that the campus outage will last up to 48 hours,”
said University of California, Berkeley, announcing all classes were
canceled. The irony that this is taking place at the West Coast mecca
of socialist thought was not lost on anyone.
With
frustration rising, California state Sen. Jerry Hill described the
mass blackouts as “excessive” in their scale.
“This
cannot be something that can be acceptable nor long-term,” Hill
told the Los Angeles Times. “This
is third world, and we are not,” he
added.
Daniel
Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA in Los Angeles, tweeted that the
power shutoffs were “a necessary bad idea in the short term” that
shifts the financial costs from the power companies to the public.
As
we reported last night, the first part of PG&E power cuts began
midnight Tuesday into Wednesday in northern California. It affected
more than 500,000 customers there, the utility company said.
An
employee walks through a darkened pharmacy as downtown Sonoma,
California remains without power on Oct. 9.
The
rest of the San Francisco Bay area was to start losing power in waves
around noon local time. A possible third phase could take place later
in the day farther south.
PG&E
said it expected to start turning the power back on Thursday but can
only do so after inspecting its equipment for damage, which could
take days in some areas.
Unfortunately
for customers, PG&E won’t be able to switch the power back on
once the winds stop.
Crews
must inspect every inch of lines to ensure they’re safe to carry
electricity again. Cities have warned residents to brace for six days
without power. “It’s not just a matter of, ’red flag’s over,
I can turn the lights back on,”’ said Gregg Edeson, a utility
consultant. “The utility really does have to go out there and
look.”
The
utility that supplies water to much of the East Bay has rented backup
generators for its pumping stations and plants, at a cost of $400,000
for the season. But the fuel to run those generators could cost
$75,000 per outage, said Andrea Pook, spokeswoman for the East Bay
Municipal Utility District. And the district is still asking
customers to conserve water, limiting the need for the generators.
“As
an insurance policy, we’re asking customers to be mindful,” she
said.
PG&E’s
warnings gave residents and businesses time to prepare, said Joe Eto,
a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff scientist. Many
companies, he said, can now have employees work remotely, conducting
business through the cloud if needed. And if their own homes go dark,
there are other places they can take their laptops to charge up and
work.
“Never
underestimate the resourcefulness of people under stress,” he said.
Then again, this is California...
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