California’s severe wildfire season escalated Tuesday as Pacific Gas and Electric Co. cut power to tens of thousands of households in an extreme attempt to prevent more catastrophes amid fast, dry winds.
PG&E, the state’s largest utility, deliberately shut off electricity for 172,000 homes and businesses, nearly 23,000 of them in the North Bay, because intense expected winds combined with low humidity made fallen or broken power lines much more likely to cause devastating wildfires.
Affected residents may not have power restored until sometime Wednesday, once the weather passes and PG&E has been able to inspect its equipment. The National Weather Service has imposed a red-flag warning of extreme fire threat until 8 a.m. Wednesday for high elevations in the North Bay and East Bay as well as the Santa Cruz Mountains.
PG&E officials stressed in a statement that they institute fire-prevention blackouts only “as a last resort, when it is necessary to do so to protect public safety from extreme wildfire threat.”
The shut-offs are the first time this year that PG&E has deliberately cut electricity in the name of fire safety, hoping to avoid more disasters like those it caused in the last five years. It’s a big test for PG&E, which emerged from bankruptcy protection just a few months ago and was roundly criticized for its poor execution of fire-prevention blackouts last fall.
Circumstances are far more challenging than they were in 2019.
Numerous large wildfires are already burning around the state, including the menacing Creek Fire that sparked on Friday and within a few days blackened about 144,000 acres in the Sierra National Forest northeast of Fresno.
A record 2 million acres have already burned this year in California as the state enters what is normally its most dangerous time for wildfire. Some horrific blazes caused by PG&E power lines during dry windstorms did not occur until October and November.
Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced PG&E to rethink the way it sets up community resource centers, where residents can charge electronics and medical devices during shut-offs. Those centers now require face masks and physical distancing, along with temperature checks and various sanitizing and hygiene precautions.
The pandemic has also reshaped the way PG&E’s customers are affected by shut-offs, since many more people are now working and learning from home. Santa Rosa teacher Kelly McMahon, for example, lost power at her home last year when PG&E was trying to prevent more wildfires. But the middle school where she works still had power, so she was able to continue working normally.
Now, McMahon is teaching from home, so PG&E’s decision to cut her power forced her to postpone Zoom meetings with her students for two days.
“Due to the pandemic now and distance teaching and learning, it’s throwing us all for a loop,” McMahon said of this year’s shut-offs. “But teachers are really good about rising to the occasion.”
Also complicating matters this year, Californians just emerged from two extreme heat waves and a related electricity crunch that led to some rolling blackouts last month and the threat of more as recently as Labor Day weekend, though the California Independent System Operator reported no blackouts.
The rolling blackout crisis and fire-safety shut-offs are separate issues with distinct causes. But the conditions underlying each — extreme heat and high fire danger — are expected to persist and even worsen in California’s warming climate.
“Climate change is going to be disruptive and expensive,” said Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “The other thing to say about power infrastructure is it was mostly built a long time ago for a climate that doesn’t exist anymore and for a population that was smaller. It’s going to be a challenge, and we need to think big.”
Wara said California may need to rethink how it provides power to some communities, including parts of the North Bay and Sierra Nevada foothills that have repeatedly been subject to PG&E’s fire-prevention power shut-offs. Part of the solution, Wara said, may mean installing more “microgrids” that allow areas to isolate themselves from the rest of the electric system.
PG&E has begun to adopt microgrids in some ways, including by using fossil fuel generators to keep electricity flowing at certain substations and neighborhoods. PG&E also helped a Native American tribe in Humboldt County establish a permanent microgrid powered by solar panels and batteries, and the company is involved with another one planned for the local airport.
To improve fire safety shut-offs this year, PG&E said it installed nearly 600 devices that allow the company to shut down more narrow portions of the grid. And for some of its larger transmission lines — the ones supported by tall steel towers, not wood poles — PG&E has installed 36 switches that let the company redirect power to keep the lights on in some places.
Some customers in fire-prone areas have taken matters into their own hands and installed their own backup power. That was evident in the Santa Rosa area Tuesday morning, when normally quiet neighborhoods along Highway 12 were buzzing with a cacophony of generator noise.
Residents there faced a complicated dilemma: Sweltering heat and no air conditioning made it unbearable to stay inside their homes, but the mixture of wildfire smoke, along with the noise and pollution coming from generators, also made for an unhealthy experience outdoors.
Still, resident Joanna Holmes said being outdoors was better than the alternative.
“I’d rather have this than a wildfire,” Holmes said outside her home on St. Mary Drive, just off Montecito Boulevard. Her dog and a neighbor’s dog both lay cooling off and panting in her driveway.
Holmes said the mixture of power outages, wildfires and heat has gotten progressively worse in recent years. But she has no plans to move away, and none of her neighbors do, either.
“This is home,” Holmes said.
Laura Parker echoed those sentiments as she stood outside while her 2-year-old son, Wes, rode along the sidewalk on his scooter.
“Where are you going to go?” Parker said. “If there’s not wildfires, there’s tornadoes and earthquakes.”
Last year, Parker learned the hard way to anticipate the need for power outages and evacuations — she almost had to throw out half a pig she put in the freezer, shortly before she had to evacuate for two weeks. Parker managed to save the pig, but she learned a valuable lesson.
“This year I learned not to buy half a pig in August,” she said.
J.D. Morris and Michael Williams are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com, michael.williams@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris @michaeldamianw
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