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California residents brace for wave of preventative power blackouts

Accra, Oct. 22, (UPI/GNA) – After millions
of California residents were put in the dark two weeks ago by Pacific Gas &
Electric, the state’s largest utility says it may have to cut electricity to
much of the state again this week — as a measure to prevent accidental
wildfires.

More than 200,000 customers in 15 California
counties were notified Monday they could lose power this week, for as long as
48 hours. The utility said the second round of blackouts will mostly affect the
Sierra Foothills and the northern part of the San Francisco Bay Area.

PG&E pre-emptively turns off power in
areas where there’s the greatest risk of power lines or other infrastructure
creating a wildfire. The utility was responsible for multiple wildfires last
year, including the Camp Fire — the largest in state history — that killed
more than 80 people.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom criticized
PG&E for the blackouts two weeks ago, which left as many as 2 million
people without electricity. He said the utility should reimburse those affected
who are inconvenienced — businesses that have to close and residents who have
to stay in hotels and pay other costs of living.

The utility implemented the first of the
planned blackouts on Oct. 9, anticipating strong wind gusts that it feared could
damage power lines and start a fire. That plan included three phases of cutting
power to more than 2 million residents in three dozen counties. The move was
unprecedented in scale.

The new blackouts come after several new
wildfires in California, including the Saddle Bridge Fire near Los Angeles last
week. It was then that PG&E CEO Bill Johnson first told the Public
Utilities Commission more strategic blackouts may be necessary in the coming
years, but said he doesn’t expect major disruptions.

“I think they’ll decrease in size and
scope every year,” he told the commission, which criticized the utility
for its handling of the phased outages.

“You guys failed on so many levels on
pretty simple stuff,” CPUC President Marybel Batjer said.

During the last planned blackouts,
PG&E’s website crashed under the strain of residents seeking updates. The
utility’s call center was also overwhelmed. Newsom said he was
“outraged” and the utility later said it wasn’t adequately prepared
for the planned outages.

Johnson said Monday despite the
inconvenience of the last wave of blackouts, they likely prevented a major
wildfire.

“If you look at where the damaged
occurred on the system, it was exactly in the area where we turned off the
power,” he said. “We might have turned it off a little quicker than
we needed too, but the scope I think was correct.”

Johnson also warned that residents should
get accustomed to these types of preventative measures — for the next decade,
in fact, while PG&E makes its power lines and other infrastructure more
resilient.

The utility’s chief executive also suggested
allowing state agencies the final say in the future on whether and when
“public safety power shutoffs” are needed.

GNA

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