PG&E Continues Restoring Power, Brings in More Resources

From PG&E:

Broken pole

Pacific Gas and Electric Company continues restoring power to thousands of customers each day in the North Valley and has brought in additional workers and mutual aid crews from Oregon to help local crews restore power more quickly.

More than 250 PG&E workers and partner utility workers are in the North Valley, where heavy, low-elevation snow and heavy rains on Wednesday fell trees and damaged power lines and poles. The extensive damage to PG&E equipment, coupled with blocked roads and snowy terrain, impacted 60,000 PG&E customers at its peak on early Wednesday morning.  As of 4 p.m. Friday, about 22,000 customer remain without power, most of them – or about 19,000 – are in Shasta County, which was hit especially hard by severe weather. Nearly 3,000 are without power in Tehama County communities of Cottonwood, Lyonsville, Mineral, Mill Creek and Manton.

Pole set

PG&E has established a small base camp at the Shasta County Fairgrounds in Anderson to stage materials and support crews.

With adverse weather this weekend, there may be fresh power outages. PG&E crews and its partner crews are working to assess and repair damages to electric equipment.

Even if customers don’t see crews in their neighborhood, crews are often working on another part of the system that needs repairs before their power can be restored. Power lines don’t always follow roads and often span fields, forests and rough terrain where access can be difficult in wet conditions.

PG&E knows extended electric outages pose significant challenges for our customers and apologizes for the inconvenience.  Power outages can sometimes affect gas appliances as they require power to operate.

PG&E understands reliable information about restoration timing is necessary to help customers make plans.  Customers may call 800-743-5002 for outage information or visit www.pge.com and click on the outage tab for information.  If no outage restoration time is listed for your outage, PG&E encourages customers to have a plan for possibly being without power for up to a few days.