PG&E expects to restore power to most customers by midnight, after thousands of Bay Area residents woke up without power Sunday morning.
As of 12 p.m., 15,765 PG&E customers were impacted by the weather-related outages throughout the Bay Area — down from 28,900 a few hours earlier, said spokeswoman Deanna Contreras. Of those, 11,606 were in the East Bay.
By 4 p.m., 7,682 Bay Area customers remained without power.
Richmond and El Cerrito were hit the hardest — 19,700 customers there lost power Sunday morning. Castro Valley, Fremont, Hayward, San Leandro, Livermore, Moraga and Lafayette also were affected. Some customers in Richmond, El Cerrito and San Pablo may not get power back until Monday morning, according to Contreras.
As of 12 p.m., another 1,820 customers in San Francisco, 2,155 on the peninsula, 88 in the North Bay and 96 in the South Bay were without power.
After a long period without rain, dust, dirt and other debris built up on power lines, and then turn to mud the first time the area experiences a light rain, Contreras said. That’s what happened in multiple places throughout the Bay Area this weekend, she said. The mud on the powerlines conducts electricity, which caused outages and damage to the equipment.
Now, crews are making repairs and, in some cases, replacing power poles. PG&E can’t estimate when power will be restored, because there are so many different outages, Contreras said.
“We have crews fanned out everywhere working at dozens and dozens of work locations,” she said.
Customers who have signed up for outage notifications should get texts or automated calls notifying them if PG&E has an estimated time that power will be restored.
Unrelated to the East Bay and San Francisco outages, about 1,900 San Mateo County customers also are without power. PG&E doesn’t know what caused those outages, which started Saturday, but the utility company estimates power won’t be restored until 1 p.m. in Half Moon Bay and San Gregorio, and 7 p.m. in Loma Mar and Pescadero.
It’s taking a while to restore power in San Mateo County because PG&E has made some of those lines extra sensitive during fire season, in an attempt to prevent sparks from igniting another wildfire. As a result, the lines de-energize more quickly and more frequently, and it takes longer to restore power. PG&E crews currently are inspecting the entire length of the lines, on foot and in helicopters.
Get updates online at pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outages/map.
“We want to apologize to all our customers for the outages that they’re experiencing right now,” Contreras said, “but we’re working as safely and quickly as possible to restore power as soon as it’s safe to do so.”
