Update: As of noontime Friday, PG&E informs us that we will lose power tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon, probably for "four days." Apparently that's because high winds are predicted to continue into Monday.
Once again the day (Thursday) began with news that the latest round of weather-related blackouts would not include us. Then in the afternoon, PG&E announced that a small but very precise number of Humboldt customers--2,188 to be exact--might get their power shut off on Saturday evening, and it would last at least 48 hours.
The utility promised a map of affected areas. When it came out (without explanation) in late afternoon, the affected area turned out to be where nearly the entire population of Humboldt County is living.
By evening we were getting the robocalls from Arcata Police (there will be a blackout) and PG&E (there may be a blackout, and including a comically long code to enter on some web page for further information.) So it looks like the whole county is going to go to black, sometime on Saturday. But no general information yet on when it may start and when it may end, though it seems likely it will not be a mere 25 hours as last time.
Reassembling pieces of several stories, I'm guessing what happened was this: there are two kinds of power lines involved: the big transmission lines that transmit the power to a big area, and the thinner distribution lines that direct the power to specific places. Maybe distribution lines were involved in the first announced outage, enabling them to be so precise. But now it seems to be transmission lines that will be "de-energized," a much blunter instrument.
Why? I'm guessing it has something to do with the Kincade Fire in Sonoma, which exploded Thursday, after a live transmission line--a jumper from a transmission tower--broke. They'd shut down the distribution lines, but transmission lines were supposed to be thick enough to withstand the winds that had been forecast for that area. PG&E may once again be liable for a huge fire, and to prevent further liability, they are cutting off all our power up here.
I don't mean to deny the danger. Southern California and the central coast are dry and hot, and now very windy. Winds are forecast for far northern California, and though we've had rain recently, there's none in the forecast. A lot of people in this state are without power or going to be, and thousands are being evacuated, including whole towns.
So there are fires, and there is fire danger, though (thankfully) not for us. In a sense we will be sacrificing in order to lessen the danger for others. That is uncomfortable but acceptable in a decent society--but of course that's not all that this represents.
We're paying for a company's greed in the recent past, and it is leaving us with a chaotic situation involving one of the essentials of civilized life: electric power. I don't see how PG& E survives this, but what's the alternative?
Meanwhile, a longer blackout than last time will test the vulnerabilities it suggested, and reveal suspected and unsuspected new ones. Once again, it appears that it will be a massive blackout, so resources will again be stretched thin until they are nonexistent.
And we've got a whole day to think about this, do what we can to prepare, and await the latest "information."
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