Two days before California utility Pacific Gas & Electric began shutting off power on October 9, Sakura Martin was frantically messaging people on Slack. Martin, a 17-year-old in San Francisco, is an organizer with the Sunrise Movement, the youth-led environmental activist group. At 10 p.m. that evening, she and three other organizers were setting up a spreadsheet that would connect people who were due to lose power with resources.
A few hours earlier, PG&E announced it would be cutting off power to nearly 2 million of its customers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California. The planned outages were due to expected high winds and low humidity in the area — conditions that can quickly fan wildfires. A spark from a PG&E power line started last year’s Camp Fire, the state’s deadliest on record, which claimed 86 lives and incinerated the town of Paradise. The company has since filed for bankruptcy.
In about 12 hours, Martin’s spreadsheet had more than 200 entries from people offering their homes, their WiFi, a place to shower or do laundry, even to house people’s pets. Martin set up the spreadsheet because she felt a sense of urgency when she first heard about the outages, especially when she thought about the people who rely on electricity for their health. “If we have the resources to help them, we should be helping them,” she told Bitterroot.
Martin lives outside the affected area, so she was able to keep putting her electricity and WiFi to work throughout the outage, but she heard from several people who needed help powering their CPAP machines and other medical equipment. She was able to connect all of them to someone with electricity nearby.
“Every single person on that list was so willing to give up their time and space for other people,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting so many to offer so much.”
Most customers affected by the October 9 outages had power back on by October 11, but another round of planned blackouts could have Martin’s network again offering up their homes and electricity. By Thursday, the utility had cut power to about 500,000 people in 17 Northern California and Sierra Nevada foothills counties. The Kincade Fire sparked in Sonoma County Wednesday grew 10,000 acres overnight and forced evacuations; it burned another 6,000 acres Thursday. (PG&E on Friday said a live transmission line broke near where the Kincade Fire started.) Blazes have also erupted in Southern California, and high winds could require yet another blackout this weekend.
Steven Weissman, who started the University of California Berkeley’s Energy Law program after working for the California Public Utilities Commission, said it is clear these mass outages won’t stop anytime soon, and they could impact customers throughout the region. Weissman said anyone living in a state with wildlands near an urban area could experience such outages in the future as the risk of intense wildfires increases.
Other utilities in California have used outages as fire prevention measures, Weissman noted. However, companies like San Diego Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison have used them selectively and in much smaller areas than has PG&E.
“Such a massive shutoff [like PG&E’s] suggests an inability to operate their grid with more precision,” he wrote in an email.
But, he said, PG&E does face a more difficult situation as its service area is just so massive. “San Diego Gas and Electric is a fraction of the size,” Weissman said. “PG&E has 16 microclimates.”
Even so, Weissman said PG&E hasn’t invested enough money and resources to safely maintain their equipment, poles, wires, and transmission towers. Ultimately, this negligence made it so cutting power was the best way to reduce risk. “The fact that they have to shut off power in order to keep the system safe — you have to see that as a failure,” he said.
California Governor Gavin Newsom echoed this sentiment in a letter to PG&E CEO William Johnson. For his part, Johnson stated that cutting power was the right decision. Additionally, Johnson wrote that since the Camp Fire, “[PG&E] inspected every mile of our distribution and transmission system.” He also noted that they have since inspected and fixed “700,000 electric-system poles, towers and substations.”
In the Oakland hills, Joan P. (she didn’t want her last name used) received a text from PG&E two days before the first outage. By the time she got to Target to stock up and prepare, “the shelves were bare,” she said. She got a radio and a battery pack, hurrying to check in on her parents, who are in their 80s.
On October 10, when her power was out, she drove to Merritt College, where the city of Oakland had set up an emergency resource center with electricity and WiFi. She walked away with five bottles of water and no update on when she would get power back. “I was frustrated. I was angry,” she said. “What did we learn from this? Because this is crazy.”
Shane Hill, who lives in Grass Valley, has gone through three power outages this month, and said he received alerts from PG&E only before the first.
“There have been so many unexpected consequences from this outage,” he said. Hill has twin daughters, barely two months old. They got sick during the last outage, and Hill suspects it was because he couldn’t heat their home.
He also worries about the financial stress this puts on his family. About $400 worth of food in his fridge spoiled during the last outage. His girlfriend, who he has four kids with, lost wages because she had to stay home with the children while schools were closed. Hill tried calling PG&E to see if they had any plans to help him financially since they didn’t give him any notice of the outage. “[PG&E] has no intent nor interest in reimbursing my family for their negligence,” he said.
During the first shutoffs, it’s estimated more than 90,000 people lost power in Napa County — more than two-thirds of the county’s population. Of particular concern to county officials were the approximately 450 residents in Napa who rely on medical equipment that requires electricity in their homes, according to Noel Brinkerhoff, the county’s public information officer. To prepare for those particularly vulnerable residents, public health officials worked with the sheriff’s office and local emergency response teams to call and visit those residents to see if they needed any help throughout the outage, said Brinkerhoff. Hospitals there also lost power and used back-up generators to remain in operation.
Nearby, about 200,000 Sonoma County residents lost power. The county set up stations throughout the area for people to come charge devices like phones, computers, even wheelchairs. County officials also set up their own online map to show residents where the potential outages could happen. The map became crucial to emergency preparation as PG&E’s own website shut down before the outages due to high traffic.
All of this emergency preparation was costly. Sonoma county spent over $1 million in responding and preparing for the outage, closed over two dozen schools, and lost an estimated $10 million in business revenue. They are still assessing the full cost and overall effects of the first outage. County officials are sending out surveys to local businesses, hospitals, and residents to compile this information. The costs will mount further. Less than two weeks after that first outage, more than 27,000 Sonoma customer accounts have lost power as the Kincade Fire burns nearby.
For her part, Martin is keeping the spreadsheet active and updated during the current outage, and will do the same for the next one, whenever it comes. “We know that there’s going to be future problems,” she said. “We have [the spreadsheet] in case anything does happen.”
This story has been updated to reflect the latest wildfire developments.
