PG&E plans power outages for Bay Area, Northern California

The area is affected. Allie? Yeah, 11,000 homes and businesses in the Bay Area, but even more than that, when you expand this power shutoff to the entire Northern California region, which is what is expected to happen in the next couple of days. Now, we're in the Berkeley-Oakland Hills, and people here have power, but that could change in the next 24 hours. There's about 4,700 customers in the Berkeley-Oakland Hills who've already gotten notice from PG&E that they are expecting to shut off their power starting 5 o'clock tomorrow morning. PG&E says this is a safety precaution. They're concerned about dry, windy conditions over the next couple of days, and that's why they have to do this. So let's take a look at PG&E's outage map. These are the areas that are expected to be affected in the Bay Area with this planned power shutoff from PG&E. The sections in Orange across five Bay Area counties are included. That includes Sonoma, Solano, Napa, Alameda and Contra Costa counties. It's expected to go into effect five o'clock tomorrow morning and in some places the power could remain shut off until Saturday evening, October 17th. Now neighbors in this part of the Berkeley-Oakland Hills tell us the last time they had a PG&E planned power outage was several years ago. They were surprised to get the notice yesterday about the power going off again because of wildfire risk especially since this particular street and neighborhood has no power lines overhead they're all underground surprised yeah but what can you do you can't fight them right you just go with the flow very inconvenient uh i might have to get a hotel room because i have a child too so i haven't decided yet it would be a very very much of an inconvenience yes to say the least so that's all i would say about that you'd have to have a little prior warning to have that done. You can't have it the day before. Now as you mentioned there's about 11,000 Bay Area PG&E customers who are expected to be affected by this planned power shutoff from PG&E but this is happening across northern California. Dry and windy conditions expected farther north of us and in the Sierra as well so altogether about 70,000 PG&E customers in 29 northern California counties are going to be affected by this shutoff in the next two days. Now, here where we are in the Berkeley-Oakland Hills, Fire Station No. 7 is right next to us, Oakland Fire Station No. 7. However, we talked to the firefighters here. They have generators, so they are not expecting to be without power. Those generators will kick in because, as you can imagine, Fire Station absolutely needs power to serve their emergency functions as well. So everyone else, though, on this street and in other parts of the Berkeley-Oakland Hills, though, is preparing to have no electricity for the next couple of days. Back to you.