Holy cow you guys cant get a break . Its rained here the last three nights it's raining right now wish I could send it to you Guy's

 

I got plenty of power here but they cut the power to about 800,000 homes in the red flag zone. We have dry conditions and high north winds.

 

Dam. That hard . Those Poor people what the hell do you do if you don't have a generator or a well. I'm lucky I have a well but the power goes out I can still get water

 

It's only a day, maybe a day and a half. They'll recover...

 

Apparently the concern is that the older infrastructure may be a problem as downed power lines could spark fires given high winds.

Has this preemptive power shut down ever happened before?

 

They said on the fake news The power company is in bankruptcy . I wonder if that's true

 

This is something I’ve never heard of anywhere.

 

Wow that sucks

 

@Lioness

I lived in Southern California for awhile and at this time of the year wildfires were a staple but they never turned off the power.

 

I’ve lived here all my life, and this is a first for us. PG&E just settled the lawsuit they had from the fires that were caused by a gas explosion in San Bruno back in 2010, and they were found guilty of 6 felonies. They already know the fires that destroyed Paradise were caused by a downed power line, so they are liable for that, and they are taking no chances if they can avoid it now.

 

@Rixer

I remember that the sky was orange in several locations in Orange County at night at this time of year.

It’s less heavily forested for sure but the chaparrals were extremely vulnerable.

 

@Rixer

I hope you’re not too inconvenienced. I guess I prefer a wetter greener climate.

But that’s hardly where I am right now.

 

I wonder if it even crossed the minds of the Congress from
Californian...Now would be a good time for the House to
work on an infrastructure deal with the President?

 

So the winds kicked up during the night here, but we still have power in my area. Further north it was apparently shut down yesterday sometime.
At my dentist appointment yesterday, she was talking about doing barbecue to cook during an outage, and I told her I have enough canned food to live on for a while if needed!
I got the 10 pack of tuna at Costco! lol

 

@Rixer you state is burning an My state is under water .
This the streets of Ocean City hope , the kids were having a ball kayaking through the streets though

 

Elderly man died 12 minutes after PG&E cut power, but autopsy says outage wasn’t the cause

A 67-year-old man with health issues died 12 minutes after Pacific Gas & Electric cut the power to his Pollock Pines neighborhood in Northern California late Wednesday, and his daughter believes the outage was a contributing factor.

However, an autopsy by the El Dorado County Coroner’s Office late Friday determined the cause of death was a heart issue, not the power outage, a spokesman said.

Robert Mardis Sr. was using a continuous positive airway pressure machine that helps keep airways open, but it stopped working when the electricity was cut by PG&E around 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday, said Marie Aldea, his daughter. She said her father collapsed and died 12 minutes after the power went out at her home, where her father was staying.

“The power had just gone off so he was going to his portable oxygen machine,” Aldea said. “We weren’t even able to get to the generator it happened so quick.”


The El Dorado County Sheriff/Coroner’s Office conducted a postmortem exam Friday afternoon.

“An autopsy was completed this afternoon and the cause of death was determined as severe coronary artery atherosclerosis,” the office said in a statement. “Mardis also had a clinical history of COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease]. The investigation into this death has concluded and this case is considered closed.”


Oct. 11, 2019
Asked to elaborate, Sheriff’s Sgt. Anthony Prencipe said in an email that “the power outage was NOT the cause of death.”

PG&E’s intentional power outages this week — aimed at preventing wildfires caused by wind-damaged electrical equipment —elevated concerns about how the elderly, disabled and poor would cope, especially in California’s rural areas.

Aldea said she will not pursue the issue but remains convinced that the outage played a role in the death of her father, a former gardener at Oak Ridge High School in El Dorado Hills.

“The power outage didn’t help,” she said. “It was only a matter of time before this [death] happened, but it happened sooner than it was supposed to.”

Before the autopsy, Gov. Gov. Gavin Newsom, was asked by reporters about the death and said he supported the sheriff’s office investigating.

“That is devastating beyond words,” Newsom said of Mardis’ death. “Losing a family member is horrific.”

 

Profit over responsibility.
California power lines spark wildfires and prompt blackouts. Why not just bury them?

Why can't California's fire-prone power lines be buried underground, out of harm's way?

That was the question many were asking this week as hundreds of thousands of customers lost power in the Sacramento and San Francisco areas in preemptive shutoffs by Pacific Gas & Electric. Further south, another 200,000 customers of other utilities faced warnings that they too could lose power due to high winds.

Experts say the answer is simple: money.

"It's very, very expensive," said Severin Borenstein, a UC Berkeley professor of business administration and public policy who specializes in energy. Borenstein was speaking through the crackly static of a cellphone outside his darkened home in the San Francisco suburb of Orinda on Thursday evening. The Berkeley campus was shut down and his home had lost power, too, after PG&E instituted a mandatory "de-energization" across nearly 40 counties due to high fire threats.

It costs about $3 million per mile to convert underground electric distribution lines from overhead, while the cost to build a mile of new overhead line is less than a third of that, at approximately $800,000 per mile, according to a section on PG&E's website called Facts About Undergrounding Power Lines.

Photos: California wildfires spark mandatory evacuations in Los Angeles

California has 25,526 miles of higher voltage transmission lines, and 239,557 miles of distribution lines, two-thirds of which are overhead, according to CPUC. Less than 100 miles per year are transitioned underground, meaning it would take more than 1,000 years to underground all the lines at the current rate.



$15,000 for every PG&E customer?
PG&E, the state's largest utility, maintains approximately 81,000 miles of overhead distribution lines and approximately 26,000 miles of underground distribution lines. It also has about 18,000 miles of larger transmission lines, the majority of which are overhead lines.

At a cost of $3 million per mile, undergrounding 81,000 miles of distribution lines would cost $243 billion. PG&E has 16 million customers; distributing that expense equally would amount to a bill of more than $15,000 per account.

"It's very expensive," said Constance Gordon, a public information officer with the California Public Utilities Commission. "The utilities don't want to pay for it out of their pockets, so ratepayers would have to pitch in, and people don't want to pay for that."

PG&E is not flush with cash: The investor-owned utility filed for bankruptcy in January, facing $11 billion in liabilities related to wildfires. This week, the company's shares tumbled after a federal bankruptcy judge ruled that the utility no longer had the sole right to shape the terms of its reorganization.

Underground costs can vary depending on trenching and paving. If gas and telephone utilities share costs with electric companies, conversion costs can come down, but it all comes out of the customer's pocket eventually.

A report prepared by the Edison Electric Institute, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind, An Updated Study on the Undergrounding of Overhead Power Lines,” found that while most new commercial and residential developments across the United States tuck electrical facilities underground, burying existing above-ground electric distribution systems can cost up to $5 million a mile in urban areas.

Environmental concerns would also be high if thousands of miles of trenches were dug through forests or brushland habitat, Borenstein noted. Opposition could also arise from residents in existing neighborhoods confronted with the prospect of heavy-duty earth-moving projects.

Neighborhoods can tax themselves to bury lines
Since 1967, the California Public Utilities Commission has had a rule requiring utilities to contribute funds to communities for utility conversion projects from overhead to underground infrastructure, paid for partially by ratepayers.

The CPUC has a longstanding policy that if a neighborhood wants underground power lines, it can have it done if residents pay for it themselves, with some required contributions from utilities. Sometimes developers and cities are willing to pitch in for certain areas, but the process is still labyrinthine.

That program does not prioritize lines in high wildfire hazard risk zones, but some residents in communities that experienced wildfires, including coastal Malibu and Rancho Palo Verde, have pushed for that policy to change to prioritize risky areas.

Sometimes the concerns are more centered on aesthetics than safety, and communities are willing to pay, or to have their local governments work to find funding. In the city of Palm Desert in the Coachella Valley, for example, residents' demands to bury unsightly lines led the city council to approve a $600 million underground utility plan in October 2018. But that's just the beginning of the process.

If residents want the utility lines moved underground, they have to initiate creating a special district to tax themselves to pay for the project. To create a special district, residents need to collect signatures, and residents within the district's boundaries need to vote on the issue. In Palm Desert, the city hopes to help fund some of these projects, such as by paying for the portion of the move underground that is on public property.

Electric wires are increasingly placed underground in areas of new construction for aesthetic reasons, with developers picking up the cost. And in Paradise, where the devastating 2018 Camp Fire sparked by a power line flattened most of the town and killed 86 people, PG&E is preparing to lay underground lines.

Traffic: Saddleridge Fire shuts down multiple freeways, creating a traffic nightmare in Los Angeles and beyond

"I don't know if I agree with it," said Borenstein of that plan, who thought it could offer a false sense of security. "Though when you are starting from scratch, it is much cheaper if all the houses have burned."

But Borenstein and others noted that problems can occur underground as well. Animals can chew buried lines or lightning can short out ground connections, just as animals can damage lines overhead, or a dry tree branch can drop. The state's extremely varied landscapes are another challenge.

"In some places undergrounding works, and in some places it doesn’t," said Mark Ghilarducci, director of the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. "California’s topography is challenging. ... I do know PG&E has taken a concerted effort, as well as all the utilities, to do undergrounding where possible."

Governor signs more than 20 fire-related bills
The solutions for PG&E's fire-prone wires are straightforward, but will take time after years of neglect, said a clearly irritated Gov. Gavin Newsom at a Thursday press conference. PG&E needs to be brought into the 21st century in terms of technology, and the utility's equipment needs to be "hardened" against fire threats and maintained properly, he said.

"But to harden and upgrade 100,000 miles of line, come on, that's not gonna happen in a week or two, or even a month or two, or a year or two," Newsom said.

Earlier this month, Newsom signed into law over 20 wildfire-related bills.

One example: SB 584, introduced by Sen. John Moorlach, would require electrical corporations to invest funds for overhead to underground electrical infrastructure conversion projects by July. The projects would be partially funded by grants from the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. But the bill has languished on the floor.

Borenstein agreed that vegetation management and hardening transmission and distribution lines are better, more easily implemented alternatives than burying 100,000 miles of lines.

"That means mowing, cutting trees, perhaps replacing wooden poles with concrete poles, and all the rusted transmission towers," he said. "They're trying to do these things, but they have a huge backlog of work."

Other possible measures include insulating exposed lines or installing sensors, including cameras or devices that can detect a spark or a short and even shut down a line automatically.

What about solar panels and batteries?
So if you can't bury your power line outside your front door, what about going "off the grid" with batteries in case of power outages?

Borenstein said that for most people, it's out of reach. A Tesla-produced Powerwall — a big battery that can store energy produced by solar power on a home rooftop, or electricity sucked from the conventional grid — starts at $6,000. There are additional expenses for installing a switch to "island" a building's electric system, isolating it from the grid.

Oct. 11: Two dead near Los Angeles as Saddleridge fire forces 100,000 people to evacuate

One thing is for sure: With a warming climate increasing the frequency and ferocity of wildfires, blackouts could become a far more regular occurrence in California, joining New England with its snow-induced outages, or the Southeast or Midwest with hurricane and flood-related power losses.

"I think this climate change is a major factor," Borenstein said. "Electric lines have been sparking and starting fires for years. But they're much bigger now, with much more vegetation."

More and more people moving into wildlands only compounds the problem, creating a flammable mix.

His personal solution? Lots of LED battery flashlights, and a large supply of ice to protect food supplies.

 

PG&E diverted safety money for profit, bonuses
Fire crews search through the rubble of homes in San Bruno, Calif. on Friday, Sept. 10, 2010 that were destroyed by a massive natural gas pipeline explosion Thursday night.


Pacific Gas and Electric Co. diverted more than $100 million in gas safety and operations money collected from customers over a 15-year period and spent it for other purposes, including profit for stockholders and bonuses for executives, according to a pair of state-ordered reports released Thursday.

An independent audit and a staff report issued by the California Public Utilities Commission depicted a poorly led company well-heeled in its gas operations and more concerned with profit than safety.

The documents link a deficient PG&E safety culture - with its "focus on financial performance" - to the pipeline explosion in San Bruno on Sept. 9, 2010, that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes.


The "low priority" the company gave to pipeline safety during the three years leading up to the San Bruno blast was "well outside industry practice - even during times of corporate austerity programs," said the audit by Overland Consulting of Leawood, Kan.

Making money
But PG&E wasn't hurting for cash, according to the audit. From 1999 to 2010, the company collected $430 million more from its gas-transmission and -storage operations than the revenue authorized by the California Public Utilities Commission, which sets the rates the company can charge its customers.

"PG&E chose to use the surplus revenues for general corporate purposes" rather than improved gas safety, the Overland audit said.

The audit was unable to trace exactly how PG&E spent the diverted money. But in a separate report on the San Bruno explosion released Thursday, the utilities commission staff noted that in the three years leading up to the San Bruno explosion, the company spent $56 million annually on an incentive plan for executives and "non-employee directors," including stock awards, performance shares and deferred compensation.


"A cursory review reveals that a significant portion, in the millions, has been awarded to the CEO," the commission staff report said in a reference to former PG&E head Peter Darbee, who retired last year.

Cutting corners
By cutting back on pipeline-replacement projects and maintenance, laying off workers, using cheaper but less effective inspection techniques and trimming other pipeline costs, PG&E saved upward of 6 percent of the money designated for pipeline safety, maintenance and operations programs, the Overland audit said.


Meanwhile, on the revenue side, transmission pipeline operations were "very profitable" for PG&E since March 1998, the audit said.

Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, whose district includes San Bruno, called the company's diversion of customers' money "criminal behavior."

"When you divert funds intended for maintenance and safety to profits, there is nothing clearer," Hill said. "It is criminal."

Hill noted that the San Mateo County district attorney, the state attorney general and the U.S. attorney's office are conducting a joint investigation of the San Bruno disaster. He said he would talk to them about incorporating the Overland audit in their probe.

However, it is unclear whether PG&E broke any criminal statutes governing its behavior at the time, unless there was fraud.

The utilities commission staff report said that under state law and agency regulations, PG&E could spend less than what it was authorized to spend "because the commission is generally precluded from asking for the money back if the company overestimated its revenue requirement."

The Legislature passed a law last year, sponsored by Hill and others, that requires a utility to account for any under-spending and explain where every dollar went.

'Truly unconscionable'
"It is truly unconscionable that PG&E was allowed by the CPUC to steal ratepayer monies that should have been spent on safety and, instead, was put in the pockets of PG&E shareholders," said Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, who represents the devastated San Bruno neighborhood. "All these monies identified in the audit should be returned to ratepayers, presumably as a credit against the work that PG&E should have done, but didn't."

PG&E officials declined to comment on specifics of the two reports.

"Our No. 1 priority is to make our system the safest in the nation," said PG&E President Chris Johns.

No new money
The utilities commission issued the documents as part of a process that could lead to millions of dollars in fines. In addition, the commission recommended changes in how PG&E spends money on gas-system maintenance and pipeline replacement.

Before PG&E "seeks additional ratepayer funds," the commission said, it should:

-- Allocate $95.4 million that the company under-spent on capital expenditures since 1997 - including pipeline replacement - for those purposes.

-- Use the $430 million in additional revenue it collected since 1999 "to fund future transmission and storage operations."

-- Use $39.3 million that it collected but failed to spend for pipeline-transmission operations and maintenance since 1997 for those purposes.

Those recommendations put the commission and PG&E on a collision course.

In August, PG&E outlined a plan to modernize its gas-transmission lines in response to the San Bruno disaster. Included was money to replace 185 miles of pipe segments in PG&E's 5,700-mile gas-transmission system and to upgrade 200 miles of other segments unable to accommodate a modern inspection tool known as a "smart pig."

The company pegged the price at $2.2 billion and said 90 percent of that would be paid by gas customers through rate increases, with the rest covered by company investors.

Meeting new rules?
On Wednesday, PG&E issued a statement promising that it won't dun customers for any expense required to upgrade its gas system to meet existing federal and state standards.

"That said, let's be just as clear about what PG&E is proposing," the company added. "The vast majority of the pipeline safety work going forward is not about correcting issues from the past. It's about meeting entirely new standards being established by the California Public Utilities Commission."

PG&E estimated that the average residential customer will pay $1.93 per month more through 2014 to finance the work.

A Chronicle investigation published in March revealed that in 2000, PG&E sharply curtailed a program started in the mid-1980s to replace hundreds of miles of aging gas-transmission pipe. Records obtained by The Chronicle showed the decision was made by PG&E and approved by the utilities commission's safety chief.

The Overland audit noted that PG&E's replacement of transmission pipelines for safety purposes all but ceased in 2000

 

FUCK The Democratic People's Republic of Kalifornistan.... I left in 99. Best choice I've ever made in my life...

 

Is the power still off there?