Lights out: Power cut in California to prevent deadly fires

Sonoma: More than a million people in California were without electricity Wednesday as the state's largest utility pulled the plug to prevent a repeat of the past two years when windblown power lines sparked deadly wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes.

The unpopular move that disrupted daily life prompted by forecasts calling for dry, gusty weather came after catastrophic fires sent Pacific Gas & Electric Co. into bankruptcy and forced it to take more aggressive steps to prevent blazes.

The drastic measure caused long lines at supermarkets and hardware stores as people rushed to buy ice, coolers, flashlights and batteries across a swath of Northern California. Cars backed up at traffic lights that had gone dark. Schools and universities canceled classes. And many businesses closed.

Most of downtown Sonoma was pitch black when Joseph Pokorski, a retiree, showed up for his morning ritual of drinking coffee, followed by beer and cocktails.

The Town Square bar was open and lit by lanterns but coffee was out of the question and only cash was accepted. Pokorski decided to forgo a 30-minute wait for a cup of joe from the bakery next door and move on to beers and a couple greyhound cocktails of vodka and grapefruit juice.

"I'm not a coffee freak," Pokorski said. "I can take it or leave. It's no big thing."

Customers at Friedman's Home Improvement store were guided by employees with flashlights and head lamps to snatch up batteries, power cords and other necessities to get them through possibly several days without power.

With the sun shining outdoors, not a wisp of smoke in the air and only gentle breezes, the action was condemned by many of those whose lives were inconvenienced.

Contractor Rick Lachmiller who was buying extension cords for his generator, was upset and said he felt PG&E jumped the gun on the outage, since it wasn't windy Wednesday morning, and didn't provide enough warning.

"People have refrigerators full of food," he said. "It leaves this whole community scrambling around trying to save their food or their job or whatever it is." More than 500,000 customers in Northern California were without power, the utility said.

PG&E had warned that it planned to expand the outages to about 250,000 other customers later in the day to prevent its equipment from sparking wildfires during winds that are forecast to build. About 2 million people were expected to be affected for up to several days.

By late Wednesday night, however, shutoffs had only been extended to a few counties in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the central valley, leaving the San Francisco Bay Area unaffected.

Spokesman Jeff Smith said it was unclear when the Bay Area would be hit because it depended on the weather, which authorities were watching closely.

The utility took drastic action because of hot, dry Diablo winds sweeping into Northern California, said Scott Strenfel, PG&E's principal meteorologist. They were also part of a California-wide weather system that will produce Santa Ana winds in the south in the next day or so, he said.

"These (weather) events historically are the events that cause the most destructive wildfires in California history," Strenfel said.

"To everyone asking, 'Where's the wind? Where's the wind?' Don't worry, the wind is coming," said Steve Anderson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

"Obviously PG&E doesn't want to cut the power when there's already strong winds. You want to cut the power before it happens." Gusts of 35 mph to 45 mph (56-72 kph) were forecast to sweep from the San Francisco Bay Area to the agricultural Central Valley and especially in the Sierra Nevada foothills, where a November wildfire blamed on PG&E transmission lines killed 85 people and virtually incinerated the town of Paradise.

The cutbacks were deemed a last resort and followed a plan instituted after the Paradise inferno and several other blazes blamed on PG&E equipment that forced the utility into bankruptcy over an estimated 30 billion in potential damages from lawsuits.

PG&E has cut power several times this year and deliberate outages could become the new normal in an era in which scientists say climate change is leading to fiercer blazes and longer fire seasons.

Very few fires were currently burning in California on Wednesday. Only a tiny fraction of acreage has burned, so far, this year compared to recent years though no one has attributed that to the power cuts.

The utility planned to shut off power in parts of 34 counties to reduce the chance of fierce winds knocking down or toppling trees into power lines during a siege of dry, gusty weather.

Outages weren't limited to fire-prone areas because the utilities must turn off entire distribution and transmission lines to much wider areas to minimize the risk of wildfires.

Before the lights were supposed to go out in the East Bay town of Moraga, cars queued up at gas stations and customers filled carts at the town's only supermarket with bags of ice, canned goods, loaves of bread, breakfast cereal and water.

Lines were also long at pharmacies and hardware stores, where emergency supplies were running low.