Hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents tossed out perishable food and recharged cell phones when their lights finally snapped on this winter after multiple storms left them for hours without power. For one tiny mountain community, the outages lasted much longer.
At the end of a long driveway off a narrow, twisty road through the redwood forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Betty Arnold, 75, endured outage after outage after outage. Twenty-two in total, she said, scrolling through the outage notifications PG&E sent to her phone.
The final one, from March 21 to April 4, lasted two weeks and a day, affecting Arnold and 32 of her neighboring households a few miles above downtown Saratoga off Highway 9.
“The last one has really been so upsetting to me,” she said. “I’ve been so stressed out.”
Seven million PG&E customers in Northern and Central California endured power outages of 12 hours or more this year, as a series of winter storms PG&E calls “unprecedented” delivered landslides, floods, snow and falling trees and branches across the region. But only a tiny fraction of those customers received a pummeling that cut their electricity for two weeks straight.
PG&E’s most recent reliability report shows a significant upward trend in the average number of outages per customer lasting five minutes or more in its service area between 2016 and 2021, with incidents rising 29% to 1.3 per year. In the same period, the average duration of sustained outages skyrocketed 56% to nearly three hours.
The utility attributed the reliability decline to severe storms, wildfires and a fire-prevention system that shuts power off automatically when an object touches a power line.
Arnold, a retired pediatrician, had never gone through such a long time without power and had never felt the need for a generator. During the two weeks, she used battery-lit candles and flashlights at night, and with the temperature inside her house dropping as low as 48 degrees, she bundled up in heavy clothes and a ski cap and slept beneath layers of blankets. The storms took out her well-water system for 37 days, including the period when she had no power.
“I’ve lived here for 40 years,” Arnold said. “I’ve always loved this property, but on the other hand, I can’t go through another winter like this. The mental and physical anguish was horrible.”
Up another mountainside in the area, Kathy and Loren Zemenick discovered early in the lengthy outage that their generator wasn’t up to the task of pumping their well water and powering their home. They borrowed a stronger generator from a friend, and it blew out the control boards on their dishwasher, refrigerator, double oven and dryer, said Kathy, 67. “It will cost $6,000 to get them fixed,” she said. “New, it’ll cost $13,000.”
The couple, who struggled to run their home-based internet-service company while their power was out, were hanging laundry to dry all over the house, she said. “We’ve lived up here for 25 years, never with problems like this,” she said.
Further up the mountain, Margaret and Tony Ciraulo discovered that their decade-old generator lacked the juice to run their dryer or oven, so they made do without those appliances — until the generator went kaput. “We were really in a pickle,” said Margaret, 90. Tony went out and bought a new generator for $1,300. The couple, living for 50 years in the house Tony built, spent $50 per day on gas to power the new generator, said Tony, 92. They availed themselves of a PG&E program for $300 rebates on generators, although Tony, a retired IBM mechanical engineer, said the online process for obtaining a rebate was “a disaster” and it took him more than two days and a call to the utility to complete the rebate application.
The 33 PG&E customers in that area had previously lost power for four days in mid-March. The utility, citing “widespread and extensive damage” to its infrastructure in its Northern and Central California service area from 15 winter storms, attributed the outages — and their durations — to two landslides on Highway 9.
“The area was inaccessible for several days after each incident,” PG&E said. “While we strive to restore power as quickly as possible to customers during storms or other severe weather events, we may encounter challenges that block access to our equipment and hinder restoration. We worked with Caltrans to gain access to our equipment as quickly as possible to assess the damage, develop a plan to safely repair our equipment despite the landslides and to execute our work to restore power.”
The first outage came from a landslide causing a tree to fall into power lines, PG&E said. The utility’s crews arrived within a half hour, but “due to the landslide and having no access to the area we were unable to begin repairs,” PG&E said. It took two days to get safe access.
Five days later another slide took out three power poles and multiple spans of power lines, cutting power to the same homes again. But Caltrans denied access to PG&E because of unsafe conditions and utility crews only got in two weeks later, the utility said. “This area required extensive repairs due to the widespread damage and perilous conditions at the site of the landslide,” PG&E said. “Our crews had to reconfigure the electric system in the area and select new locations for the equipment to be installed due to the mudslide after the old equipment was removed.” Less than 48 hours after crews arrived, power was restored, the utility said.
Residents in the area expressed frustration with PG&E over the lengthy outages but acknowledged the unusually severe winter and extensive damage to the utility’s infrastructure complicated power restoration. Still, the mountain dwellers shared a particular aggravation: repeated but false notifications from PG&E that their power would come back on soon.
“You go and buy some food, and then that gets wasted,” Arnold said.
Katy Morsony, a lawyer for consumer group The Utility Reform Network, said she attended a state legislative committee meeting this week where a PG&E representative suggested the utility would seek regulatory approval for hundreds of millions of dollars in fee increases to pay for work related to the winter’s storms.
In response to a question about that reported suggestion, PG&E described the winter’s storms as “historic in magnitude” and said they required restoration efforts spanning several months. “We are in the process of determining the overall costs associated with the storm events and will seek future recovery through the legislatively approved process,” PG&E said.
The utility said that across its service area, between Dec. 31 and March 27, it replaced 5,977 power poles and 906 miles of wire, and removed 13,844 trees that damaged infrastructure.
But there are many trees in many forests. “Every year they cut branches — it’s useless,” said Arnaud Charton, a software engineer whose home in the Saratoga mountains was without power for 40 days over the winter, including the 15-day outage. “There is always a tree that falls somewhere.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com