PG&E beefing up staffing during atmospheric river
PG&E held a press conference at its San Carlos service center on Tuesday to provide information on how the utility is preparing for power outages amid an ongoing storm that struck the Bay Area this week.
An atmospheric river is bringing heavy rain and strong winds to much of the region, peaking on Tuesday. Additional rain is also expected to continue through Friday, according to the National Weather Service.
The stormy weather has caused people to lose power. As of 3 p.m. Tuesday, about 27,000 PG&E customers in Northern and Central California were without power.
“We’re starting to enter the peak risk period in terms of rain, winds and the associated outages,” said Jake Zigelman, vice president of PG&E’s Bay Area region, during the briefing. “So we expect that to ramp up over the course of the day and into the evening.”
PG&E uses a storm outage prediction tool, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, to calculate where outages are expected to occur.
“It gives us a really good prediction of how many outages there will be, where they’ll be located, and the staffing levels required to respond to those outages,” Zigelman said.
On the Peninsula, PG&E is expecting parts of the Santa Cruz Mountains and western San Mateo County to be impacted the most.
As of Tuesday afternoon, there were 3,429 customers without power on the Peninsula, mostly in Pacifica, Colma, Daly City, Montara, Moss Beach, and El Granada, according to PG&E spokesperson Tamar Sarkissian.
In addition, 3,816 customers in the North Bay and about 1,000 customers in the East Bay were also enduring outages as of Tuesday afternoon.
“Crews are out in the field right now responding to a handful of outages that are already underway,” Zigelman said.
Customers at higher elevations are more susceptible to downed power lines and outages since wind speeds tend to increase as elevations go up.
Heavy rains can soften the soil where trees grow, weakening the anchor that tree roots have in the ground. Adding strong winds to the mix can increase the risk of trees uprooting and potentially falling on power lines.
“When you combine winds with saturated ground, that’s where we tend to see potential vegetation failures, which could damage our assets and cause outages,” Zigelman said.
PG&E said it will offer overtime and bring in employees who may not have been working Tuesday in order to beef up staffing levels.
“The way that the restoration process works is first, we have to gain safe access to our assets,” Zigelman said. “Then we go out and assess if there’s damage, then we’ll repair that damage. We’ll be dispatching assessment workers and then repair crews as we identify those outages.”
Customers should prepare for outages by fully charging devices, having an extra power bank, securing all outdoor furniture, and acquiring a well-functioning generator.
Downed power lines can be deadly if they are still active, therefore PG&E says it is imperative to stay away from them and assume that they are energized.
All customers should automatically receive a notification when their power goes out, an update for when power is expected to be restored, and then a final message once the power goes back on, Zigelman said.
