Posted on 10/10/2019 11:40:20 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
This is an urgent message from the County of Santa Clara Office of Emergency Management. The time is 11:27 p.m. (PST, Wednesday October 8, 2019). Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) has begun the Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS), for areas of Santa Clara County. Your location could be affected and lose power for up to seven days
PG&E is providing a Customer Resource Center that will have charging stations for phones and plug-in medical devices, drinking water, air conditioning, and other amenities. This will be offered at the Avaya Stadium, at 1123 Coleman Avenue, San Jose 95110 from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every day for the duration of the event. The City of San Jose will also have three resource centers open. Please check their website for more information.
(Excerpt) Read more at sccgov.org ...
Good luck
The best back up generators are the type that run off natural gas or propane.
My daughter has one of these. She has a 1000 gallon underground propane tank. They can run their whole house generator for over 3 weeks without having to refill their tank. They also heat their house with a propane furnace.
I have a Honda 7500 watt inverter generator. It was $3500 brand new. It is the best gasoline generator you can buy IMHO. However, the problem with ALL gasoline generators is that they only hold 8-10 gallons of fuel. Mine will run about 24 hours on a full tank. I have three other gasoline cans. Therefore, after 1 1/2 days I HAVE to go in search of fuel. You also don’t want to store gasoline very long these days because of the ethanol content. Even if you put stabilizer in it.
The problem is sometimes the gasoline stations also have no electricity to run their pumps. I remember one ice storm passing three stations before I finally found one that was running. There was a line of almost ten cars. Everyone was filling up 3-4 gas cans. The only longer line that morning was at Dunkin Donuts for coffee.
“Deregulation has created this gigantic mess.”
And you thing CA utilities are deregulated? THEY’RE all but run by CPUC and CALEPA!
Could your generator be converted to run on propane?
My wife is a CA native. I moved to CA after college in 1973. I loved it for 30 or more years; then it all started changing rapidly. The incredible success of all the new companies in Silicon Valley (first HP, Lockheed, Ford Aerospace; then a new wave of Cisco and Apple; finally the wave of Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tesla and many others) created such wealth that it really ruined the place. Traffic is absolutely horrendous. Rudeness of close quarters living and wealthy brats is off the charts. Then the staggeringly stupid progressive politics and tax policy further ruined it. Now every house buyer in our neighborhood on the peninsula is either Chinese or Indian and you hear English less than half the time in our town. Every kid enrolling in our school district is a transplant from China.
Then drought, wildfires and forest fires the past few years. The lack of any improvements in water infrastructure. Now this power debacle. The whole state is a freaking mess.
To top it off, the Dems want to do away with Prop 13 which has made it somewhat affordable for long-time house owners like us. Now the Dems in the State Assembly are working to get rid of single family zoning and make everything high-density. Everybody can build an auxiliary “in-law” unit in their backyards (”in-fill housing”) with almost no setbacks.
The last straws are the incredible filth, feces, needles, graffiti and bums everywhere.
As dragnet2 said, “it became something we didn’t even recognize.”
While we still love the great natural beauty of CA, we really cannot stand it anymore. I didn’t want to leave in my late 60s - I had hoped it would be a nice, pleasant middle class town where we could keep the ancestral homestead and have kids and grandkids visit. But, alas, that is not to be. We decided to buy a place in North Idaho and really like it here. Right now we are splitting our time between two places and will spend another year figuring out our retirement game plan.
The real fix for the problem is to clear brush, thin trees so they will be healthy...when trees are crowded they don’t grow right- think toothpicks right next to each other which leads to disease and insect infestation. When a fire happens it is not a normal fire with the excess brush and sick trees for fuel...it becomes an inferno. The environmental groups sue the government and when judges side with them they are in charge of managing public lands instead of agencies that are supposed to. This is not just an issue in CA it is throughout the SW and the reason we have inferno fires now.
California has the added issue that they got state laws changed too so now there are many regulations on private property owners as to if they are allowed to clear brush and how much they are allowed to clear on their own property. So in CA it is both public and private land that is a fire hazard.
Socialists can’t manage land any better than they do other things. After the last (or one recent) fire was blamed on utility company instead of the socialists bad land management the utility company said well we will shut of the power when fire danger is high.
You should look into that and see if it is neglect or if the socialists have sued to keep them from clearing brush and thinning trees. I know it is a favorite thing for the socialists to sue over some critter or what not that needs to be "saved" and keep agencies from managing land properly. In some cases they have even been able to get state laws passed so they can regulate private property owners too.
Socialists and their pet judges cause many of the issues that are blamed on agencies that are supposed to manage the land and now power companies are getting the blame as well.
Truth is if the land is properly managed and there is a fire it is a normal fire and if the area has not been managed the fires are infernos.
We’re you a boy scout?
Be prepared.
I guess that’s only for people that think for themselves.
Thank goodness your wife has someone that THINKS ahead.
Exactly what used to be done before the enviros started using lawsuits and friendly judges to get control of what is done with the land.
The enviros are not letting brush be cut or trees thinned in many places so fires become infernos.
In the photo with the transformer, how much voltage is in that top side? 7680?
Will FR be affected by this power outage?
Ummmmm, deregulation is not why PG&E is killing power delivery. PG&E is still a de facto local monopoly.
OVERregulation is why this is happening. CA laws and lawsuits prevented PG&E from upgrading their transmission lines, from being able to keep vegetation away from their lines, from anyone clearing out deadwood fire hazards from around lines.
If you can’t do preventative maintenance and you get sued into bankruptcy if you keep to your ‘obligation to serve’ and provide power to people, what the hell option is left?
There’s a huge effort underway here in North Idaho to thin out the forests so the trees are spaced 20 - 30 feet apart. That way they grow taller and stronger — and the fires don’t reach the crowns. The fires are limited to the underbrush.
As I write, big slash piles are being burned around us because the weather turned cool and damp. Hiking through the forests around here, you often see these enormous slash piles ready for burning. This is not just on the utility rights-of-way, but throughout the national forests.
“Will FR be affected by this power outage?”
That’s a good question. Normally I would say “no” as hosting sites would be remote and have good geographic diversity in case of big natural disasters. But FR is run on its own servers and they seem to be in the Fresno area. I don’t know what the FR disaster plan is.
Jim, can you comment? This question has been asked several times.
They are expendable
The four major voltage classes are 5, 15, 25, and 35 kV. Utilities most widely use the 15-kV voltages as shown by the survey results of North American utilities in Figure 1 (below). The most common 15-kV voltage is 12.47 kV, which has a line-to-ground voltage of 7.2 kV.
My son got a notice he would have no electricity for 5 days.
What are they doing about people who need electricity for machines that they require for medical conditions?
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Oh, that’s a feature of Obamacare they forgot to tell you about.
It was a nice place when we left it in 1974.
What has happened is Berkeley has spread out and taken over the state.
Answered here: https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/3784839/posts?page=4#4
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