Thousands of people in the Berkeley Hills lost power for part of Wednesday afternoon as strong, dry winds raised wildfire danger throughout the region.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. reported 4,659 customers lost power in an unplanned outage that began just before 1 p.m. and covered higher elevations of the North Berkeley Hills and Kensington. Service was restored for all of those customers by 4:45 p.m.
The utility had earlier Wednesday cut power to unpopulated parts of the hills just east of Berkeley in an effort to ensure its equipment would not spark a wildfire, amid a powerful off-shore wind event that prompted forecasters to issue a Red Flag Warning for the city this week. That pre-emptive outage, which the company calls a “Public Safety Power Shutoff,” only affected a dozen customers.
Utility spokesperson Tamar Sarkissian wrote in an email that the larger outage was not directly related to the intentional power shutoff, but was caused by the same windy conditions.
The Red Flag Warning conditions created by the off-shore winds, which allow wildfires to spread quickly, are forecast to last through Thursday morning.
About 22,000 customers throughout PG&E’s service area have lost power as a result of the pre-emptive power shutoff, about 2,400 of them in Alameda County, though those figures do not include the unplanned North Berkeley outage.
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Nico Savidge is Berkeleyside's associate editor, and has covered city hall since 2021. He has reported on transportation, law enforcement, politics, education and college sports for the San Jose Mercury... More by Nico Savidge
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