10/25/2021 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 10/25/2021 01:15
Approximately Two-thirds of All Customers Who Lost Power Today Have Been Restored
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) continues to execute an all-hands-on-deck response to the early-season atmospheric river storm that delivered high winds and several inches of rain throughout Northern and Central California today.
Since the storm arrived in the early hours of Sunday morning, approximately 380,000 customers have lost power. That's about 7% of the utility's 5.5 million electric customers.
As of 6 p.m. Sunday evening, power has been restored for approximately 250,000 of those customers and approximately 130,000 customers remain impacted.
PG&E's response includes opening our system-wide Emergency Operations Center as well as four regional storms centers and 20 local storm centers. There are approximately 3,000 electric and tree crews on the job, including distribution and transmission line crews; troublemen and women, which are the utility industry's first responders to an outage; inspectors; and vegetation crews. Hundreds more employees are staffing the storm centers, performing safety duties, delivering needed equipment to PG&E yards and more.
Those crews were pre-positioned to be in place where PG&E's in-house meteorology team had forecasted that storm impacts would be most severe.
Additionally, PG&E has requested mutual assistance from nearby utilities to ensure that customers are restored safely and as quickly as possible. Crews from San Diego Gas & Electric are expected to arrive by Tuesday.
A Significant Early-Season Storm
The heaviest impacts are being felt in the greater Bay Area with San Mateo, Santa Clara and Marin counties having the most outage totals.
The storm continues to impact PG&E's service area as it moves southward overnight and into Monday. Customers in Fresno, Kern, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties are likely to face potential outages.
PG&E meteorologists report that maximum wind gusts of 52 mph were recorded in Chico, 43 mph in Half Moon Bay, 45 mph in Oakland and 60 mph in San Francisco. Rainfall totals reached 5.8 inches in Auburn, 4.5 inches in Napa, 5.2 inches in Sacramento, 6.2 inches in Santa Rosa and 4.99 inches in Ukiah.
PG&E's stand is simple, that everyone and everything is safe. With that in mind, crews will continue to work overnight, on Monday and into the week until all customers are restored.
Keeping Customers Informed
PG&E knows how important it is to keep its customers informed. Customers can view real-time outage information on its website outage center and search by a specific address, by city or by county. This site has been updated to include in-language support for 16 languages.
Additionally, customers can sign up for outage notifications by text, email or phone. PG&E will inform customers about the cause of an outage, when crews are on their way, the estimated restoration time, and when power is restored.
Storm Safety Tips
Other tips can be found at www.pge.com/beprepared.
About PG&E
PG&E, a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation (NYSE:PCG), is a combined natural gas and electric utility serving more than 16 million people across 70,000 square miles in Northern and Central California. For more information, visit pge.com and pge.com/news.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211025005322/en/
Media Relations
415.973.5930
Source: Pacific Gas and Electric Company