Another PG&E Shutoff: 33K Sonoma County Customers Notified

SONOMA COUNTY, CA — More than 33,000 Sonoma County PG&E customers were among 209,000 across 15 Northern California counties given a 48-hour notice Monday afternoon of a possible Public Safety Power Shutoff starting late Wednesday evening, Oct. 23.

Along with Sonoma County, Napa and San Mateo are the only other Bay Area counties included in the possible shutoff that is scheduled for varying times in response to a dry, offshore wind event, PG&E officials said.

The National Weather Service has issued a fire weather watch for the North Bay mountains, East Bay Hills and Diablo Range and Santa Cruz mountains above 1,000 feet. Gusty north to northeast winds along with poor overnight humidity recoveries will bring critical fire weather conditions over the higher terrain Wednesday afternoon through Thursday, according to the weather service.

PG&E officials said their meteorological and operations teams' models show wind gusts may exceed 55-mph late Wednesday evening through Thursday afternoon for portions of the Sierra Foothills, while winds between 35- and 45-mph with some 55-mph gusts in localized areas are forecast for Sonoma and Napa counties.

The shutoff is intended to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire ignitions from its energized power lines that could fall during inclement weather.

"Over the next day or so, we will decide when and where we will implement the public safety power shutoff," PG&E CEO and President Bill Johnson told members of the media Monday evening.

Customers were notified by text and automated phone calls Monday afternoon, and PG&E said an employee will knock on the doors of customers with medical issues who are enrolled in its Medical Baseline program.

In Sonoma County, there are 1,082 medical baseline customers among a total of 33,613 customers who would be impacted by the shutoff in Annapolis, Boyes Hot Springs, Cloverdale, Fulton, Geyserville, Glen Ellen, Guerneville, Healdsburg, Kenwood, Larkfield, Santa Rosa, Sonoma and Windsor, according to PG&E.

PG&E officials said they will focus their efforts on those customers who need electricity for life-sustaining equipment.

PG&E said the shutoff would affect 9,623 customers and 206 baseline customers in Napa County and 6,462 customers and 104 baseline customers in San Mateo County.

Customers should prepare for an outage that could last up to 48 hours, Johnson said.

Regarding "lessons learned" from the Oct. 9 shutoff that also impacted Napa and Sonoma counties, Johnson said the PG&E website is prepared this time around for a higher volume of visitors. The website will automatically direct visitors to a temporary PSPS website that will include an address lookup tool, he said.

PG&E expects to tell customers in Napa and Sonoma counties Wednesday morning whether they will lose power. Power would start going off at about 2 p.m. before the winds start picking up at 5 p.m. with the current weather forecast.

Other counties potentially impacted include Amador, Butte, Calaveras, El Dorado, Lake, Mendocino, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Sierra, Sutter and Yuba.

"If you are one of the approximately 200,000 customers potentially affected, we will continue to contact you directly," Johnson said.

As for community resource centers for charging cellphones and other necessary personal electronic devices during the outage, Johnson said PG&E is working with cities, counties and tribal governments on providing sites that are "accessible to all customers."

Local governments will also be assigned a remote or onsite outage mapping specialist, he said.

"We don't want to turn off the power, but if we have to do so, we want to inform people how to stay safe," Johnson said.

Here's the full PG&E press conference:

—Bay City News Service contributed to this report.