Today, Explained - California's blackouts

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

The wildfires in California have gotten so bad the state's biggest utility is turning off the power on purpose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So imagine you're a Californian. You are going about your life and day as normal. And you start noticing that the weather has changed. It's gotten windier, drier, what we call a red flag warning in California, where we know that the conditions are really ripe for wildfire. And then you start hearing, maybe through the news, maybe through social media, that Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which is known locally as PG&E, the state's largest utility,

is going to start actually turning off the power on purpose in order to prevent their equipment from sparking wildfires. They want to create an emergency situation so that we don't end up in a bigger emergency. So you are basically being told to prepare to lose your power to prevent an emergency. Hundreds of thousands of customers are without power across California, waking up to a widespread blackout as utility companies try to lower the risk of deadly fires. So what do you do?

You start thinking about what happens if the power goes out for an extended period of time. We're talking days on end. So maybe you decide to go to Target or Walmart or wherever you kind of go to your big box store and you're probably going to stand in line for a while with a lot of other people who are buying things like ice and batteries, maybe even generators. You're trying to think through how do you feed your kids, keep yourself safe, maybe get to work because maybe you still have to go to work in this whole situation. So then the power gets cut. And now you're sitting in the dark and you probably took the time to charge your cell

phone ahead of time. Maybe you have some backup power, but you're really worried about whether or not you can communicate with people, tell them you're all right. You're also worried that there could be a fire because the whole point of this is that these are really scary conditions that could lead to a wildfire. And so especially if you live in a more rural community, you're probably trying to keep an eye on your phone and make sure that there's no, say, emergency evacuation orders happening. But also you're trying to make sure that you don't open your refrigerator accidentally because the more you open it, the more likely all your food is to spoil. If you own a small business, you've probably been forced to close.

You're probably not going to work or school. Most of the time schools are going to be closed if the power goes out. So you're also trying to figure out what to do with your children. And then you get word that there is actually a fire happening. On this block alone, several homes incinerated in minutes. A miracle to save firefighters, everyone got out alive. And it might just be a sheriff's deputy or police officer outside with a loudspeaker telling you to get out of your neighborhood. Sheriff's office! Where you at?

Come on! She's disabled. All right, let me get her feet. Let me get her feet. So then you have to get in your car and try to fight with everybody else trying to flee this fire. Highway 101 is now closed in both directions because the smoke is heavy and the wind is so fierce.

And odds are, if you're in one of these areas, you probably have lived through wildfires in the past. And so you're going to have, quite frankly, the trauma of that situation and having fled flames before sort of weighing on you. Also, you know what else goes out when power goes out and then wildfires sweep through? Our cell phone towers.

So your cell phone may not even be working. So you can't call anyone. You are in a place where potentially the street lights don't work, the traffic lights don't work. You are trying to get away from an advancing wildfire. This isn't actually like some apocalyptic Hollywood movie. This is what's been happening in California in recent weeks, in Southern California as well as Northern California.

But the biggest effects and the scariest ones so far have been really in sort of the area surrounding San Francisco and up into the Sierra foothills, where in several different kind of segments in recent weeks, we've had power cut to upwards of 2 million people at a time. And in the last week, we saw a huge fire breakout in Sonoma County. The Kincaid fire, the largest in the state, doubling in size this weekend. The blaze now bigger than Boston.

This ring video showing residents fleeing as the flames race towards their homes Friday morning. You can see the blaze towering over them in the hills nearby. Hundreds of thousands of people who were without power already or adjacent to areas without power then had to flee their homes from these wildfires, including one that broke out on Sunday right next to one of the bigger bridges in the area. Look. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, you can feel it.

I cannot believe they're letting us drive through this. It feels very end of days here because you feel the winds, you know what that means. Governor Gavin Newsom actually said on Monday, Many of you may not be aware that we have put down over 330 fires just in the last 20 hours. Those are the ones we don't even hear about. But that puts in perspective sort of just like the magnitude of what's happening here.

It feels like it's everywhere and it's almost inescapable. Marisa Lagos, you've been covering these fires and PG&E, California's biggest utility, for years now at KQED. But right now, California's in a state of emergency. How much of the state is dealing with fires or blackouts or both? We are talking about hundreds of miles north and south of San Francisco, as well as huge swaths up in the Sierra foothills. So, you know, from Lake Tahoe and north and down toward Yosemite. And what about in Southern California? Southern California really hasn't been experiencing this level of blackouts.

Now, part of that, of course, is because of how huge PG&E's service area is, but it's also because this is a utility with a really terrible track record that is already in bankruptcy court because of the past fires it caused. And is it a point where they are really trying not to screw up anymore for the future of their company and, by extension, our electricity service because it's the only one we got. And so they're sort of balancing the fact that we all pay them for the power and it's really inconvenient when it goes out

with the fact that a huge wildfire in the conditions we're living in right now can spread very quickly, threaten tens of thousands of homes, and obviously kill people that we've seen in years past. Obviously because of the Camp Fire and because of the San Bruno explosion, PG&E doesn't exactly have the full trust and confidence of the people of Northern California. How does it decide at this point who's electricity to kill and who's to keep on? That is an excellent question and one that we have some clarity on, but not a ton. So some of it may be just an abundance of caution. But I think more broadly, we're talking about old technology here.

You know, you have transmission towers and other equipments that's decades old. Most of it is not undergrounded. It's all hanging out there. And that's the problem. When the wind kicks up, if it takes down the lines, they spark fires. And so even with these shutoffs, it's possible that PG&E may have caused the big fire now burning, the Kincaid fire in Sonoma County. They've also admitted that their equipment probably caused a couple of other minor fires in the East Bay this weekend. PG&E now says two fires that broke out Sunday less than 20 miles northeast of San Francisco in Lafayette, including one that destroyed this tennis club, may have been caused by its own electrical malfunctions.

Even as a large portion of the state sitting in the dark. The utility also says it failed to notify 23,000 customers, including 500 with medical conditions, before shutting off their power. It feels like a tricky time to learn how to do this on the job. Is PG&E ready for the rest of this fire season? No. I mean, PG&E's answer to their ongoing equipment problems isn't, we can fix this quickly. It's that we're just going to cut off your power. I mean, we're paying for a service and they're telling us they do not have the ability to deliver that service in a manner that's safe and going to keep California's lights on. And so I think nobody's ready and there's a lot of anger and they've said that it could take them 10 years

to basically fix this. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty messed up. I mean, beyond PG&E, like, how's California doing right now? It's kind of rough, honestly. I mean, it feels like even in San Francisco, where I am, where the power has stayed on and in some ways life has sort of, you know, marched on as normal. The weather's just been strange. Like, it doesn't feel natural to have 90-degree heat in San Francisco in mid-October with very high winds. You know, you wake up in the morning and you walk outside, you can smell smoke. I have young kids. We're constantly monitoring the air quality and talking about whether we should let them play outside,

which is super awful because I live in a two-bedroom apartment and keeping two boys inside all day is like terrible um and obviously these are minor problems compared to people who are in evacuation centers or sitting in the dark or whose homes are burning up but I do think that there's a sense right now that like things are weird here and this has happened the last couple octobers and I don't know this used to be my favorite time of year. It's Halloween this week. Things should be sort of like cooling off. Start wearing your fall clothes. And it just feels not right. My name's Abram Lustgarten. I live in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, and we're into our second blackout. So my kids are home from preschool, which is closed, and we've been without power for four days now.

Refrigerator is not working. Our heat does not work. We can't use cell phones or access data lines to connect to the Internet. And we are primed for evacuation at any moment should there be a fire in our very vulnerable area. So the vehicle is packed with spare water and emergency kits and face masks and headlamps and, you know, all sorts of emergency gear. So we're ready to go. It's an intense, almost apocalyptic kind of feeling. Not only is there an enormous fire about 40 miles north of us, the Kincaid fire in Sonoma. But just this sort of feeling of foreboding, waiting for the other shoe to drop like a disaster is imminent, but no one can quite say, you know, when.

At the same time, the power shutoffs have made life incredibly inconvenient. It's not a big deal to go without power for a short period of time, but you go days and days on end and you realize all the intricate ways in which your daily routine and necessities are interconnected with the power grid. Abram, you are an environmental reporter for ProPublica and you wrote about this experience you've been having in Marin County, just that California is in, despite this inconvenience and this sort of frenzy that your family's experiencing, that these power outages can be a good thing. How so? to awaken people to the reality of the climate changes that are taking place and that are going to be taking place with ever-increasing severity in California and across the country. And there's a sense in which the blackouts, they make that obvious for whom it's not already obvious.

You can't deny that something is happening when the power shuts off in your community. Northern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, it's a wealthy area, it's comfortable people. And this kind of disruption, you know, it puts the issue right, you know, front and center, it's difficult to avoid. It seems like California is getting hit harder by these climate change related weather events right now than the rest of the country. Is that the reality? Or is it just that fire makes for much more striking an image than water? You know, the fires are a particularly violent and disruptive image. I think they capture the imagination of people watching it from afar. But if you take a step back, you can start to see these sorts of dramatic changes in lots of places. I mean, we had the Midwest floods last year, the extraordinary and

unprecedented way that rainfall has hit Houston, not only in Hurricane Harvey, but in storms since then, which defies the record of your average hurricane. The way that temperature is simply increasing across the country or wildfires that we've seen in places like Tennessee and across the Southeast. There was a study that came out last week about how American infrastructure and bridges will begin to collapse because the heat changes will affect the expansion joists. So the signals out there, if you listen and you start tuning into it, you start to see these dramatic changes across the country. California has been particularly vulnerable because it's been hotter than usual.

That has made it particularly vulnerable to burning at the same time that these winds that come every year have also intensified. It's sort of a perfect storm, but it's, I think, emblematic of the kind of changes that you can see happening in a lot of different places. This is like the third year in a row that California's experienced these kinds of extraordinary seasonal wildfires, right? It is, yeah. It's starting to feel like a new routine. Yeah, I wonder about that exactly. If it's routine, does it become sort of expected and therefore, I don't know, less affecting? Are people getting sort of used to this idea that, oh, it's fire season, this is going to suck, and then it goes away and then it comes back?

That sounds logical, but I can tell you from living in it that no one feels that way yet. The fire season sets in with the smoke first, you know, so you can't exercise or go outdoors the way, you know, you might normally want to do it. You feel it in your, you know, in your throat, in your eyes, you know, then the local warnings kick in about avoiding fires, staying indoors. Then you have the planned power shutoffs that intensify the whole experience. It's a pretty dramatic disruption. In your reporting, do you see the rest of the country taking note of what's happening in California? Or does this still feel sort of isolated to the Golden State?

Yeah, no, I think the country is definitely taking note. I mean, you know, this is, I think, the most coverage that the San Francisco Bay Area has gotten in the New York Times and the Washington Post in the last couple of years. The fires are an arresting sight for people outside of the area, I think, because they're so vivid and they're so violent in appearance. It's such a visual experience. You know, there's a relatively small fire in the Bay Area last weekend where the Carquinez Bridge in Vallejo, California, was virtually engulfed in flames and smoke on its shores. And a picture of that fire, you know, was quite viral and galvanized attention, you know, across the country. There is this perception that it's somehow a unique or disastrous thing that is only about California. And I hope that people can also begin to see the bigger picture,

that this is one symptom of a much larger illness that we're all going to be experiencing in different ways. Abram Lustgarten is an environmental reporter. You can read his work at ProPublica. Marisa Lagos, who you heard from earlier in the show, co-hosts the Political Breakdown podcast at KQED in San Francisco. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham, and I host Today Explained. Thank you.