Posted on 10/13/2019 4:15:11 PM PDT by rey
Hours after electricity was restored Saturday to all Bay Area PG&E customers, officials with the utility said their crews had located at least 50 instances of weather-related damage to power equipment within outage zones, including 13 in the North Bay — about half of them in Sonoma County.
Another 100 or so cases around the greater Bay Area and the Sierra Nevada foothills were still being evaluated Saturday but are suspected of resulting from the same gusting winds that prompted the utility to shut off power to about 800,000 customers Wednesday in a controversial effort to prevent catastrophic wildfires.
Power was restored to 100% of affected Bay Area accounts by 10 a.m., and nearly all accounts across PG&E’s vast service area in Northern and Central California.
The reported damage included instances where trees or tree limbs came into contact with power lines or brought them down to the ground altogether. One such instance in Napa County — a broken tree branch tangled in a distribution lines — was featured in a photo shown to reporters during a news conference Saturday in San Francisco.
The findings demonstrate how vulnerable the region would have been to another destructive wildfire had the lines not been de-energized ahead of time, said Sameet Singh, PG&E’s vice president in charge of the community wildfire safety program.
“I think all of us are all too familiar with, unfortunately, what this potential damage could have done,” Singh said, referencing the North Bay firestorm of two years ago and the Camp fire in Paradise just last year.
The recent outage affected more than 2 million people in parts of 35 California counties, including about 66,000 customers — some 200,000 people — in Sonoma County.
(Excerpt) Read more at pressdemocrat.com ...
They fined them for NOT turning off the power, now they’ll fine them FOR turning it off.
You just watch. Snowflakes want everything both ways.
Another day in Calizuela.
Yep. I remember them screaming after the Nuns/Tubbs fire and the Camp Fire that they should have turned it off. Now they do, and they still scream.
The shutoff was a political stunt, nothing more.
It was dead calm over virtually all of the shutoff areas south of Sonoma. The fact that wind is blowing in Healdsburg means nothing 150 miles to the South. The wind today is actually higher then it was then and the power is running just fine.
Singh can move back to the Punjab and run his con game there.
I predict that a large percentage of those left without power will vote Republican. Not that the lizards in the GOPe wing deserve it.
so much lack of knowledge regarding distribution and transmission system protection.
Amazing
Sorry, no. Was not a problem for 100+ years. No rhyme or reason in the shut off areas vs. not shut off areas. Elderly Mom spent several hundred $$ “prepping” for the outage (& my 6 hours R/T drive to help her) despite her power lines being fixed/poles replaced/spreader arms widened and trees trimmed last Feb./March/April for miles and miles out to the main highway. No reason for her power to be cut. Just more PG&E incompetence...they started downhill at a rapid rate in 1996 after AB1890/”Gray-out Davis”/Enron and the 1st bankruptcy. Then the CPUC piled on with “climate change” mandates that cost them billions. That added to PG&E management incompetence and you get an unnecessary 3rd world shutoff.
We need to do as Europe and put the lines underground.
Maybe this being earthquake country, it makes it a little more difficult. But we have fires every year. Earthquakes are more rare.
What? Are you kidding?
President Trump listened to the weather man during “Alabama/sharpie-gate” and they tried to impeach him for/over it. This weather prediction stuff is serius business.
“Singh can move back to the Punjab and run his con game there.”
Hand your state over to the 3rd world, and California happens.
the socalled winds were a joke in most places
a joke
you could pipe in the local weather reports on any station from northern Cal and see the weather reporters making a huge deal about “and now we see we have 8 mph winds in X town and 12mph in Y town, and they are predicted to go up to 20 tonight)
those are normal daily breezes, nothing more.
We are betting that the reported 50 wiring problems were mostly already there! and either way, its good they found them but with the extremely inept safety oversight by either the utility and the corrupt “regulators”....there really could be many more repairs and corrections needed....
they almost certain did not find everything needing fixing, and especially not with their two day “quickie” checkup
on thousands of miles of wiring
just saying...
expect more bullbleep shutoffs
“Hand your state over to the 3rd world, and California happens”
Yup. Calizuela under Gavin Newduro.
Highest gas prices, absurd home prices, ridiculous taxes, power outages not seen in any other Western states, gun confiscation because the guy whose wife you’re screwing wants to get you (that’s why Newduro signed the bill!), bums sleeping on the sidewalks...but the Third Worlders think this is all normal. Like that where we come from they say!
“We are betting that the reported 50 wiring problems were mostly already there!”
Yup
Double “Yep”, take a look at the “50 case” photos...probably 85% “pre-existing” nothing-burgers. Just PR face-saving damage-control by PG&E.
The point of the complaints is that the good call would be not to pursue to eco nazi/commie agenda that created the environment that required the shutdown.
Santa Rosa had max winds of 24 on the 9th and 25 on the 10th. That's not "dead calm'.
Sorry dude, but the law suit holding them responsible for the last fires, and the pending bankruptcy, what the hell did you expect them to do?
That’s max wind. Peak gust was 31 and 36 on those two days.
They were fined into bankruptcy because they DIDN’T turn off the power.
Now that there are more fires if they don’t turn it off there’s now way they can prove a negative, that they didn’t start the fires.
WTF are they supposed to do when the fires start again?
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