PG&E CEO admits ‘we were not adequately prepared’ as utility rushes to restore service

Lights in many Bay Area communities began flickering back to life Thursday as Pacific Gas and Electric finally admitted what millions of Northern Californians have already concluded: The company was not fully prepared for the shutdown.

The utility’s move to take massive swathes of its power grid offline in order to avoid sparking wildfires — the largest planned outage in the utility’s history — left Northern Californians fuming about the short notice, confusing directives, and the scale of the blackouts, especially in neighborhoods where the wind barely blew.

The threat of new outages was all but over by Thursday afternoon. By 10 p.m., PG&E had restored power to 426,000 customers — while an estimated 312,000 customers remained without power. It may take days to bring everyone back. The utility said it had identified 11 instances of weather-related damaged to its system in the impacted areas.

Bill Johnson, PG&E’s CEO, apologized for the agency’s poor communication and overloaded call centers at a press conference Thursday evening. “We were not adequately prepared,” he said.

But he defended the decision to go forward with preventative outages, saying, “we faced a choice here between hardship on everyone and safety, and we chose safety.”

Critics of the utility, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, called that a “false choice,” blasting PG&E for failing to upgrade its network of power lines in recent years.

“This can’t be, respectfully, the new normal,” Newsom told reporters at the state emergency management office, saying the utility was guilty of “greed and mismanagement over the course of decades.”

As parts of the region were buffeted by strong, dry winds, the planned outages were designed to avoid major blazes like the devastating fires caused by PG&E power lines in the Wine Country and Sierra foothills over the last two years. No fires related to the utility’s equipment had been reported in the areas affected by the shutoffs, the agency said.

The shutoffs in much of the Bay Area came later and affected fewer customers Wednesday night and Thursday morning than the company had predicted. But the seeming patchwork of neighborhoods that lost electricity confused and angered residents who thought the utility overreacted.

Steve Gutfeld of San Ramon woke up struggling to breathe after his sleep apnea machine lost power at 11:13 p.m. Wednesday. He was even more distressed when he saw that his nearby neighbors still had electricity.

“They are playing with us,” Gutfeld said. “Two blocks south of me, all the lights are on. This isn’t an emergency.”

The utility still needs to check thousands of miles of power lines — a gargantuan effort involving 45 helicopters and 6,300 ground crews — before electricity service can be fully restored. Officials said they’ve already found multiple cases of damage to their equipment.

“It is not just a matter of flipping a switch,” said PG&E spokesman Jeff Smith. “It is necessary for us to go out and inspect every single mile of line to ensure those lines are safe. If we turn power back on and a line is down, that’s exactly the type of thing that can start a fire.”

Across the region, residents tried to adapt to life without power. Orinda and Lafayette looked like ghost towns Thursday morning, with most businesses shuttered and streets quiet. Residents in San Jose and Oakland gathered in community centers to get a few more bars of battery in their phones. And with power out across UC Berkeley’s campus, the school’s volleyball team was forced to move Friday’s match to the home court of Stanford, its main rival.

Some estimates pegged the economic damage from the shutdowns as more than $2 billion statewide. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said the blackouts cost the city roughly half a million dollars.

“We expect there will be some compensation from PG&E for the considerable public cost for these power shutdowns,” he said.

The first phase of shutoffs started late Tuesday night and spanned 21 counties, including Napa and Butte, where devastating fires killed more than 100 people in 2017 and 2018. Parts of Marin County also experienced outages early Wednesday as part of the planned shutdowns. The second phase — including 137,000 customers in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties — had been scheduled to begin around noon Wednesday, but was pushed back to 8 p.m. and then after 10 p.m. as winds changed. By around midnight, parts of most Bay Area counties went dark.

Northern California residents were not alone. SoCal Edison shut off power to about 175,000 Southern California customers across eight counties amid stronger-than-usual Santa Ana winds.

Uncertainty over if and when the second round of shutoffs would start had left many Bay Area residents anxious Wednesday evening. PG&E’s website crashed amid a surge in traffic of people searching for information.

Around much of the region, many who had stocked away flashlight batteries or braved long lines at gas stations — or kept their businesses closed — awoke Thursday to find that their light switches still worked.

At Carmelita’s Dog Laundry in East San Jose, longtime manager Rudy Barrera was surprised to find the power working early Thursday morning, even though PG&E had pegged his area for an outage. The doggie groomer had canceled appointments in anticipation of losing power at noon Wednesday, and was still struggling to catch up.

“I understand what they’re trying to do, but it affects a lot of people,” Barrera said of the utility’s flip-flopping. “Businesses can really lose a lot of money.”

Customers were lined up waiting to buy goods when the Safeway supermarket in Orinda opened at 7 a.m. Thursday. The store was closed overnight and employees worked with headlamps and a backup generator, which kept the cash register operational. Employee Farzeen Taban said the store ran out of batteries and propane but was still well-stocked with water and other goods.

The outages came as winds picked up speed across the Bay Area, with the National Weather Service reporting wind gusts as high as 77 mph at Mount Saint Helena and 75 mph at Mount Diablo early Thursday morning.

Several small fires popped up around the Bay Area Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Firefighters in Moraga fully contained a blaze that prompted middle-of-the-night evacuations from 140 homes shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday. And another five-acre fire on San Bruno Mountain above Brisbane was 50 percent contained as of midday Thursday.

With no light and spotty cell service, evacuations in Moraga were a challenge. Police, firefighters and fellow neighbors went door-to-door through neighborhoods lit only by rising flames to make sure residents got out, police chief Jon King said.

“Honestly, it made it more difficult,” King said of the shutoff. “We rely a lot on technology.”

Now affected residents are just counting the days until their power turns back on. Kevin Wong, owner of Orinda Chiropractic & Laser Center in Orinda, said he’s struggled to access his electronic payment and scheduling system with his computers down. He lashed out at PG&E for causing what he called a “man-made” crisis.

“I’m expecting to go into work tomorrow,” Wong said. “But it’ll be Stone Age.”

Staff writers Jason Green, Annie Sciacca, Louis Hansen, Jon Kawamoto, Peter Hegarty, and Judith Prieve contributed to this report.