Winds Knock Out Power To Thousands In South Bay

SANTA CLARA COUNTY, CA — UPDATED: Following a wind event that knocked out power early Monday to thousands of PG&E customers in the South Bay, service had been restored to all but 275 customers as of 4 p.m., a utility spokesperson told Patch. The outages, which initially affected about 11,000 customers in Los Gatos, Campbell, Saratoga, San Jose and neighboring South Bay communities — began at around 2:45 a.m. when due to strong winds, vegetation such as trees, tree branches and tree limbs made contact with power lines, said PG&E Spokeswoman Tamar Sarkissian.

The National Weather Service San Francisco Bay Area reported strong wind gusts in Campbell, Santa Clara and Los Gatos, with a 39 mph wind gust recorded early Monday at the Los Gatos RAWS (remote area weather station).

"Los Gatos was one of the areas that saw a significant number of outages," Sarkissian said.

Crews responded with the goal of working as safely and quickly as possible to get power restored, according to PG&E.

At 7:30 a.m., about 2,400 customers remained without power, including about 1,050 in San Jose, 650 in Los Gatos, 625 in Campbell and 51 in Saratoga. Additional customers had their power restored early Monday afternoon, while the hope was to have service fully restored to all affected customers sometime Monday evening, Sarkissian said.

"There is the possibility of more winds either later today or tomorrow so PG&E has all its crews from South Bay working on these wind events," Sarkissian said. "We also brought in crews from around the region to provide support."

A PG&E meteorology team is tracking the winds, she said.

Bay City News Service contributed to this report.

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