PG&E has said it is monitoring a potential public safety power shutoff that could affect around 5,000 customers across parts of eight counties in Northern California. The warning comes as forecasters track strong winds and dry conditions that raise the danger of wildfires in the region, prompting the utility to consider cutting power as a precaution.
According to the company, the counties that could be touched by the measure include Colusa and Napa, among the eight named in the area under watch. The potential shutoff would be aimed at parts of those counties rather than entire regions, focusing on the places where the combination of wind and dry vegetation poses the greatest hazard.
For now, no outages have been confirmed. The utility has stressed that it is still assessing conditions, and that whether the shutoff goes ahead will depend on how the weather develops over the coming hours and on how the wildfire risk evolves across the at risk parts of the grid in Northern California.
If the decision is made to proceed, PG&E says the shutoffs could begin tomorrow and last into Thursday. That timeline matches the forecast for strong winds and rising heat during the same period, the conditions that most often drive the utility to take the step of de energising power lines to prevent them from sparking fires.
The company noted that this would be the second public safety power outage already this season, an early sign of how dry the landscape has become. The grasses across the region remain plenty dry, and with summer like heat on the way, the risk of fast moving grass fires has climbed even before the official start of summer.
PG&E also said that new technology is helping it to fine tune the shutoffs so that only the most at risk areas are affected. The utility has framed the approach as a way to keep the number of customers losing power as low as possible, while still removing the danger from the lines that run through the most vulnerable terrain.
Residents in the counties under watch are being advised to keep an eye on the situation as the week goes on, with the utility continuing to monitor the wind and heat. The possibility of a shutoff adds to a week already dominated by warnings about wind, heat and fire weather across much of Northern California.