After a Red Flag Warning was issued for parts of the Bay Area Sunday, it was only inevitable that a PG&E Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) Outage Watch would follow suit for some areas. And that's exactly what 13 counties can expect on Monday, according to the utility company.
With the National Weather Service expecting strong offshore winds to sweep through arid areas in our slice of Northern California (and elsewhere in the state), PG&E has now scheduled a PSPS Outage Watch event for Monday. The following counties are expected to have rolling outages starting Monday:
- Butte
- Colusa
- Glenn
- Kern
- Lake
- Mendocino
- Napa
- Santa Barbara
- Shasta
- Solano
- Sonoma
- Tehama
- Yolo
It's, however, unclear which cities will be affected by the planned outage — but controlled shutoffs in those counties are expected tomorrow, per PG&E.
Customers are now able to receive Public Safety Power Shutoff alerts in 16 languages by selecting their preferred language at https://t.co/ih0yXyvlL7. pic.twitter.com/iUTQRptBur
— Pacific Gas & Electric (@PGE4Me) September 17, 2021
As with all PSPS events, power is turned off for certain customer accounts to help prevent wildfires in at-risk areas, which are those usually under some kind of fire watch, i.e. a Red Flag Warning. During these events, PG&E should notify affected customers by phone, text and email. The next step above an PSPS Outage Watch would be an Outage Warning, which necessitates the need to shut off power; those whose accounts would be affected by the power outage are notified within a few hours prior to this PSPS event.
Oh… and this all comes after tens of thousands of customer accounts were affected by an unplanned power outage on Sunday.
For more information on PSPS events, as well as how to prepare for them, visit this entirely too long URL; updates on current PSPS warnings and outages can be found at a much shorter one, here.
Related: PG&E To Sell Its SF Headquarters, Move to Oakland
PG&E Power Outage Affects 2,500 San Francisco Customer Accounts, Thousands More in the East Bay
Photo: Getty Images/Aryut