How to resolve AdBlock issue? LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Pacific Gas and Electric said Tuesday evening that it is still deciding whether or not to call another public safety power shutoff that could impact hundreds of thousands of residents across the region, including several thousand in a portion of southern Lake County.
The National Weather Service has issued a red flag warning for much of Northern California for a hot and dry wind event expected to occur Wednesday and Thursday. The warning is in effect from 5 a.m. Wednesday through 4 p.m. Thursday.
PG&E said that a decision on whether or not to move forward with the shutoff will be made on Wednesday morning, with shutoffs to portions of the Sierra Foothills and North Bay expected to begin Wednesday afternoon and additional shutoffs in San Mateo and Kern counties to start early Thursday.
On Tuesday, the company said it had narrowed the scope of the potential shutdown to 189,000 customer accounts across 16 counties, a reduction of about 20,000 customers since Monday. That reduction is the result of changing weather information and PG&E's ability to sectionalize certain lines.
PG&E said a portion of south Lake County remains in the potential shutoff area.
On Tuesday, the estimated number of Lake County customers expected to be included in the proposed shutoff dropped by six to a total of 1,895 customers – including 65 medical baseline accounts – in Cobb, Loch Lomond, a small portion of Kelseyville and Middletown.
Since Monday, a small portion of Lake County residents near Upper Lake and along Highway 20 near the Lake and Mendocino County border have been removed from the potential outage area.
The customers in south Lake County and other parts of the North Bay in the proposed shutoff area could have power turned off beginning at 3 p.m. Wednesday, while those in the Sierra Foothills could experience a shutoff at 2 p.m. Groups of customers in San Mateo and Kern Counties would have power cut at 1 a.m. Thursday.
If the shutoff goes forward, a community resource center for Lake County will be open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday at Konocti Vista Casino, 2755 Mission Rancheria Road in Lakeport.
PG&E’s address lookup tool can help south county residents determine if their home or business is in the potential outage area.
During a Tuesday evening briefing, it was reported that PG&E’s new Web site – built to handle increased traffic loads after the shutoff earlier this month resulted in massive traffic that caused its other site to crash – had gone down twice on Tuesday morning.
PG&E Chief Executive Officer and President Bill Johnson said efforts have been made to fix the Web site so that it’s fully operational going forward.
On Tuesday evening, the site appeared to be working.
Mark Quinlan, PG&E’s senior director of emergency preparedness and response and the deputy incident commander, gave a situational update.
Quinlan emphasized that PG&E has still not called a shutoff and that it continues to monitor the weather, with a decision to be made on Wednesday morning.
He said that on Monday PG&E began notifying all customers expected to be impacted and notified them again today by phone, email and text messages.
The final decision to call the shutoff will be made in consultation with state agencies including the state Office of Emergency Services, Cal Fire and the California Public Utilities Commission, all of which have representatives in PG&E’s emergency operations center in San Francisco, Quinlan said.
Quinlan explained the shutoff times for the Sierra Foothills and North Bay were set to be ahead of the peak of the forecast wind event, expected to take place at 5 p.m. Wednesday.
If deenergization takes place, an all-clear is forecast for noon on Thursday. Quinlan said once the all-clear is given, PG&E’s crews would immediately begin patrolling on the ground and in the air in order to identify damage.
Following the shutoff earlier this month, 130 cases of damage – including trees and other vegetation into power lines – were identified by inspections throughout the outage area, Quinlan said.
So far, the damage inspection work has been limited to daytime hours. However, Quinlan said that on Tuesday night PG&E will be testing the use of a California Highway Patrol plane with LIDAR, which could allow infrastructure to be patrolled at night.
LIDAR, which stands for “light detection and ranging,” is a remote sensing technology that uses pulsed lasers to generate three-dimensional information.
“We’re looking forward to those results,” Quinlan said.
Johnson – who told the CPUC during a Friday hearing that public safety power shutoffs could be necessary for at least a decade while equipment is improved – said PG&E is monitoring still another dry wind event forecast for this weekend.
On Tuesday night, with that event still 100 or more hours away, Johnson couldn’t say if a shutoff would be the result.
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