A fresh round of public safety power shutoffs (PSPS) is expected to begin Tuesday afternoon and last until Wednesday morning — and for some who lost power over the weekend, they may not be seeing it turned on again until this next "wind event" dies down.
Millions of Californians were expected to get the lights turned back on Monday, but as KPIX reports, the next round of shutoffs beginning around mid-day Tuesday is likely to impact about 1.2 million people. PG&E says it has 6,000 employees on the ground working to get power restored.
PG&E customers in Berkeley, some of whom lost power on Friday, were told by city officials to prepare to remain without power for a full week, until Friday, November 2. As ABC 7 reports, the Tuesday outages are expected to hit parts of 35 counties. Forecasters are saying that the winds in this next round will not be quite as strong as those that blew through the Bay Area Sunday and whipped up the Kincade Fire in devastating fashion.
Some 960,000 PG&E customers lost power intentionally between Friday and Saturday, and an additional 100,000 lost power due to downed power lines. As the Chronicle reports, the state is now launching an investigation into how PG&E has handled the outages.
A report made public Monday from PG&E admits to "significant shortcomings" in the handling of the power shutoffs that began on October 9. The 230-page report, which was filed with the California Public Utilities Commission, found that approximately 23,000 power customers lost power without receiving proper notification, and 500 of those were people with medical conditions that require energy resources. Additionally the report addresses the company website that crashed multiple times as millions of Californians tried to access it to get information about the blackouts.