LAKE COUNTY — Yet another Pacific Gas and Electric Company power shutoff—which will be the fourth this month in Lake County—will affect residents beginning Tuesday morning, prompted by a severe wind event bringing more warnings of high fire danger weather.
The utility had cut power to over 950,000 customers in its service area beginning Saturday, in advance of what has been called an “historic” offshore wind event that registered wind speeds above 100 mph and fanned wildfires throughout Northern California over the weekend.
A “red flag warning” was issued Monday for Lake County and much of Northern California by the National Weather Service, in effect from Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. to Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. Though the event was expected to be less severe than the major wind event last weekend, PG&E said it would cut power to (or keep power off for) hundreds of thousands of its customers starting early Tuesday.
On Monday at 4:30 p.m., PG&E announced it would initiate another power shutoff beginning Tuesday morning for to up to 605,000 customers across 29 counties, including an unspecified number in Lake County.
Some of the customers who’d been affected by the outage over the weekend could be kept in the dark through the duration of the next shutoff, which PG&E indicated would last at least until Wednesday afternoon. “The weather should clear in all areas by mid-day Wednesday,” the utility wrote in a statement. After PG&E gives the “all clear” during a shutoff, it begins inspecting its de-energized equipment and turning power back on—a process that can take many hours.
By 4:30 p.m. Monday, PG&E said it had restored power to more than 375,000 of the 970,000 customers it had shut off beginning Saturday. During inspections of its lines, PG&E said it had found more than 20 reports of damage during the high wind this weekend.
Before fully restoring power from that event, PG&E will need to inspect more than 32,000 miles of line. “Restoration will occur in stages depending on inspections and any repairs of wind damage to the electric system.”
The wind event prompting the Tuesday shutoff is expected to last through mid-Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.
“For your area, definitely the strongest winds will be Tuesday afternoon into the evening,” said Emily Heller, a meteorologist with the NWS. Sustained winds between 25 and 35 mph, with gusts between 35 and 45 mph, were expected, she noted.
In addition, humidity levels were expected to be “extremely dry,” Heller said, ranging from the single digits during the day on Tuesday and into to the teens overnight.
The major wind event that began Saturday made firefighters’ work tougher in the battle several large wildfires in California.
Those fires include the destructive Kincade Fire burning in Sonoma County, which had grown to more than 66,000 acres by Monday morning, forcing evacuations to around 200,000 Sonoma and Napa County residents.
Issued Friday night by the Lake County Sheriff’s Office, a non-mandatory evacuation warning for the Kincade Fire remained in effect Monday afternoon for the communities of Cobb Mountain, including Cobb, Adams Springs, Hobergs, Whispering Pines, Gifford Springs, Anderson Springs and along Ford Flat Road and Socrates Mine Road.
As power throughout Lake County remained off Monday morning, local officials were monitoring fire progress on the Kincade Fire and the Burris Fire, a Mendocino County blaze that began Sunday near Potter Valley and had seen Highway 20 closed between Upper Lake and Highway 101 for several hours.
Lake County Sheriff Brian Martin, speaking in a live video stream Monday, said the Burris Fire was largely “under control” from the Lake County perspective. According to Cal Fire, the fire was 20 percent contained at 7 a.m. Monday.
The Burris Fire, Martin said, no longer posed a threat to Lake County. “Take a sigh of relief for that one,” he added.
