Blackout Preview

Update Sat. 6:30 p. Latest is: shutoff at 9 p. or later, and weather all-clear tomorrow afternoon, with restoration time uncertain but sounds like no later than Monday.  Though what changes, could change back.

Update Sat. 10/26 5 p.: The hour when the power is cut off has been pushed back to 8 p. Saturday.  The wind here has picked up but this coastal wind is minor compared to the gusts expected in higher elevations in southeast Humboldt, southern Trinity county and interior Mendicino, beginning at 10 p. tonight.  This is being called potentially an "historic" wind event.  This makes the fire potential especially dangerous.
The total number of California "customers" without power could eventually approach 3 million.

Meanwhile, fires already underway are still growing.

Right now the potential is that these winds remain a danger into Monday, though I've seen no estimate on when they are expected to diminish, nor how long it will take for PG&E to inspect lines and restore power.

My impressions yesterday remain today that (1) things seem better organized and (2) there is no sense of crisis and lots of events etc. are going on as scheduled.  But it still remains to be seen how things go on the second and third day (and night) of blackout.

late Friday:
This much seems certain: early Saturday afternoon, the power goes off, and Saturday night will be dark.  Because there is some relationship to ongoing weather not far to our southeast, power is unlikely to be restored before Monday.  The blackout may well extend longer than that.

The forecast is for the potential of major wind gusts, definitely Saturday evening, and probably into Sunday.  Those winds are forecast to move south by Monday.

Around Arcata on Friday there was little sense of an oncoming crisis. Ice sold out quickly, but people were calm, if not oblivious.  Either people are sanguine in the way that Minnesotans are about winter and snow, or they are more prepared this time, or they were lulled into a false sense of security by the relative ease of getting through 25 hours without electricity.

There's no sense inflating it.  Other Californians have it far worse.  We are hundreds of miles away from any ongoing fire, with little risk of fire getting very close even if one erupts in the danger zone.  Our weather is likely to be pleasant--we aren't even forecast to experience more than a little wind tomorrow.  The night temperatures going into the 30s is something of a challenge without heat, but not true hardship.

This time community resources seem to be better organized, and those in the media in position to inform us say they have learned to organize information better.  We'll see.

We may well see how different a blackout looks on the third or fourth day than it does on the first.  I don't take this as casually as some.

I am also due to be on a plane east on Wednesday morning, and that seems even more iffy than it did before (we always face the consequences of fog at the airport here--the foggiest in the country--or in San Francisco).  Planes flew in and out during the first blackout, but after several days, who knows?

So posting here will be rare, not only this weekend but probably for the next couple of weeks.  I'm giving fair warning because I wouldn't want my legions of readers to get too anxious.  But I've set several Poetry Monday posts to appear automatically, so thou thirst for verse may be assuaged.