Nearly 13,000 Pacific Gas & Electric customers remained without power early Thursday morning across the Bay Area, four days after a potent winter storm lashed the region with high winds and heavy downpours.
The majority of the 12,781 customers without power were concentrated in the North Bay, where 8,120 customers remained in the dark as of 5 a.m., the utility provider reported. Another 2,938 customers had no power in the South Bay, while 1,668 Peninsula customers remained without power. Only a few dozen customers in the East Bay and San Francisco continued to experience power issues.
The lingering outages came after the strongest storm of the winter season roared ashore over the weekend — felling trees across the state and causing power outages that impacted more than 1 million PG&E customers across the company’s system. Hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents were impacted.
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The plodding pace of repairs caused frustration among many Bay Area customers in recent days, with residents questioning the utility provider’s preparedness and diligence in responding to the storm. They reported spoiled food and fast-rising expenses dealing with the prolonged outages, which affected nearly 38,000 people as recently as Wednesday afternoon.
The for-profit utility had already been under heavy criticism for a large rate increase that took effect at the beginning of the year — with another jump in customers’ bills on the way this spring.
Jeff Smith, a PG&E spokesman, said Wednesday the storm damaged 2,075 conductors and forced the replacement of 728 poles across its system. Another 357 cross arms needed to be replaced, as did 247 transformers.
He apologized to customers and framed the wind and rain as “the largest single storm producing multiple customer outages in nearly 30 years.” As a result, 5,000 total employees — including 533 crews — were working to address the lingering blackouts.
The work in restoring power comes as the Bay Area enters a period of sunny, drier weather over at least the next several days. High temperatures are expected to linger in the high 50s for much of the region on Thursday and Friday, before rising into the low 60s by the weekend, according to the National Weather Service.
Check back for updates to this developing story.
