This week, an 80-foot Douglas Fir tree thundered down into Rachel Wells’ driveway bringing with it a tangle of power lines. And on Friday afternoon, Wells headed into her fourth day without power as she and her husband, Evan, rely on a generator to cook frozen pizzas in an air fryer and light their home in the Santa Cruz mountains with battery-powered construction lamps.
“It’s mood lighting,” said Rachel Wells, who lives in Felton. “I wouldn’t say it’s a good mood right now, but it’s a mood.”
Wells is among more than 20,000 Californians who were still without power on Friday afternoon as a series of atmospheric storms continue to pummel the state. While PG&E successfully restored power to 2.4 million people over the past two weeks, others, including star 49ers tight end George Kittle, are still blacked out.
We’ve got our offense, defense and special teams on this, George! We’ve got the power back for 2.4M people through the past two weeks’ storms, and we’re gonna get you (and everyone else still out) back as soon as we can! pic.twitter.com/WFOJsZ4JLG
— Pacific Gas & Electric (@PGE4Me) January 13, 2023
“Yo @PGE4Me I’ve been without power going on 4 days. A lil help would be appreciated thanks. Just trying to prepare for something this weekend,” Kittle tweeted Friday to the delight of 49ers fans, referring to the Niners’ highly-anticipated playoff game this Saturday against the Seattle Seahawks.
“We’ve got our offense, defense and special teams on this, George!” PG&E tweeted back. “We’ve got the power back for 2.4M people through the past two weeks’ storms, and we’re gonna get you (and everyone else still out) back as soon as we can!”
Jake Bayless has been without power for 10 days at his home adjacent to Salt Point State Park off Highway 1 in Sonoma County. The stretch without electricity has been harrowing, he said. There are the hundreds of dollars spent on fuel to keep his house running using a generator that is “probably on its last legs,” elderly neighbors needing help with groceries and broken water mains, along with rotating the generator’s scarce power between the fridge, freezers and a water heater.
“The power goes out here every winter, usually for only a day or three, but this is one of the longest outages in years,” said Bayless. “Hopefully it’ll be back on tonight.”
The ongoing power outages are concentrated in the Santa Cruz mountains and Sonoma Coast, where woodsy towns like Ben Lomond and Felton saw a cascade of trees falling onto power lines. But even Andrew King, who lives in northeast San Jose, went three days without power, forcing him to buy a $700 generator to power his home and keep medications cold.
“You can’t do anything in your house for the most part,” he said. “My life was on pause for a few days.”
Mike Gazda, a spokesperson with PG&E, said the utility has 7,000 people working on restoring power. Even crews from Wisconsin are aiding the effort. But he said turning the lights back on in the Santa Cruz Mountains, with clusters of homes tucked down narrow winding roads, is a perennial challenge for the utility.
“A lot of these outages you can’t flip a switch and get 1,000 people back into power,” he said. “Making repairs might get a small pocket of two or six customers back into power.”
Even though Bayless on the Sonoma Coast and Wells in Felton both had critical social media posts seeking assistance from PG&E, they applauded the utility’s workers in the trenches.
“The damage out here was massive. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Bayless, who heads the California Trails Foundation. “They are working under drastically difficult conditions. With the wind still blowing, muddy roads that are completely impossible to access without tracked devices. I think we’re all super grateful for the effort that’s being put into it.”
But Bayless faulted PG&E for not putting more resources into placing local transmission lines underground, a costly process that experts say is necessary to stave off wildfires and lessen the impacts of downed trees hitting power lines. PG&E’s equipment has been blamed for a slew of wildfires, including the 2018 Campfire that killed 84, and the agency is now moving forward with undergrounding in fire-prone areas of the state.
“We all are bracing for the inevitability and inconvenience of more outages just like this,” said Bayless. “Hundred-foot trees are now regularly falling into the transmission line easement.”
Along with undergrounding, PG&E should have long ago switched from wooden transmission line poles to steel and concrete, said Robert McCullough a veteran energy consultant in Portland, Oregon. “The list of solutions is literally textbook.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com