California fire threat leaves 60,000 without power

Bloomberg

PG&E Corp. has deliberately left customers in the dark for the first time as a precaution to prevent wildfires from breaking out.
Almost 60,000 customers in six counties across the Sierra Nevada foothills and Northern California country were blacked out during a windstorm, according to Melissa Subbotin, a company spokeswoman. About 70 percent of those customers will have electricity service restored by midnight, PG&E said.
The utility owner could be on the hook for as much as $17.3 billion in liabilities if its equipment is linked to 2017’s blazes, JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimated in August. Investigators have
already said that PG&E violated state laws in 11 of last year’s fires. The company took a $2.5 billion pretax charge in the second quarter that was tied to some of those blazes.
PG&E plans to inspect each affected power line for wind damage before restarting it. Inspection crews were deployed early morning, Subbotin said. The region was buffeted with wind gusts above 50 miles per hour Sunday, according to the National Weather Service.
Red-flag warnings have been issued across a large part of northern California as dry winds, gusting to as high as 55 mph, are set to sweep across the region, the National Weather Service said.
Sempra Energy’s San Diego Gas & Electric utility has shut down electrical lines during windstorms for years, but PG&E had long resisted taking that step. SDG&E cut electricity to 360 customers after warning around 4,000 scattered across San Diego County’s mountainous back country that they could lose power.
Edison International, which owns California’s third investor-owned utility, notified customers in 40 communities across Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Ventura counties that it might cut electricity as winds increased. About 70,000 customers lost power because of the windstorms.
as of Monday afternoon, but the outages weren’t preemptive, said Mary Ann Milbourn, a spokeswoman.

Extreme and critical fire conditions also blanket southern California, according to the U.S. Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. More than 14.7 million people live in areas, including Los Angeles, where dry winds could fan flames and turn grasses, brush and trees into kindling for fuel. Some of the worst conditions could occur near Burbank, Oxnard, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, the center said.