LAKE COUNTY— This week’s winter storm is now the largest single storm producing multiple customer outages in nearly 30 years, affecting more than 1.85 million customers. High gusts and strong sustained winds caused an incredible amount of damage across our service area, including breaking or toppling 946 poles, requiring us to restring or repair more than 2,839 spans of powerlines and damaging or destroying 485 crossarm and 378 transformers. Parts of Lake County were particularly hard hit.
PG&E has approximately 600 crews on the ground continuing to restore customers throughout the day and night. When customers are restored in on area, we move them into areas where outages remain to speed up restoration there.
As of Friday afternoon, in Lake County, PG&E has approximately 539 customers without power due to the storms, including 398 in Cobb, 115 in Kelseyville, 20 in Loch Lomond and 10 in Upper Lake. These customers are in areas where damage to our system required a more complex restoration. They are in areas where damage to our system was most severe, involving access challenges, multiple work locations and the necessity to remove fallen trees. We expect the majority of our Lake County customers to be restored between this evening and Saturday night, although a few of the most isolated customers may be without power into the weekend. All customers have been provided estimated times of restoration.
We are aware of reports of customers seeing wires on the ground in some Lake County communities. Some of these wires may belong to other utilities, such as phone companies, and some of these may be PG&E wires which will be reinstalled to restore power to customers or will be removed by PG&E in the coming days. As a best practice, if you see a wire down in your community, assume it’s energized and stay away from it.
It’s important for customers to remember that the timing we provide is an estimate; in some cases, as repair work continues, we may discover additional damage or encounter access issues that changes the timing. We want customers to know that we absolutely understand how frustrating it is to be without power, especially for multiple days. This storm was incredibly intense and our crews are out in force making these final repairs. We won’t stop until the last customer has their power restored.
—Submitted
