Extreme heat causes 24 hour power outage in San Ramon, PG&E says
As PG&E struggles to keep the power on during a record-setting heat wave, the problem hit close to home for one neighborhood in San Ramon.
Their power cut off at 6pm Tuesday, but by noon the next day, it was still off.
A line of PG&E trucks gathered on Bollinger Canyon Road in San Ramon. In the neighborhood beyond, the temperature was already over 100 degrees, and the homes had been without power for more than 18 hours.
Neighbors said they were told the electricity was cut off because of predicted high winds, even though there are no overhead lines in the area. One homeowner named Kevin was fed up.
"When they turned that off, they turned it back on at 11 o'clock and they blew a substation underground, which they confirmed with me today," he said. "That had to do with, uh, 'sensitive equipment under the ground', that could fail if it's too hot out. So, then I said, if that happened at 11 o'clock last night, when did you guys dispatch a crew? And they said, oh, a crew showed up at 9:15am."
PG&E confirmed that the heat event had caused equipment to fail and they were working to replace it, with a predicted repair time of 5pm Wednesday. Larry Foster has lived in the neighborhood for more than 40 years without much trouble.
"That's happened before but it's always like an hour or two," Foster said. "But it didn't come back on until like 11 o'clock, and then it only stayed on for a few minutes. I only had time to reset one the clocks and then it went back off again."
He spent the day with the house dark, trying to keep in the remaining cool air. Down the block, Gurmel Billion decided to stop waiting. After five phone calls, his grandson brought over a generator from work to try to save Gurmel's 4th of July food supply.
"Fan go off. Air conditioning go off. Freezer go off. Everything. And now we're waiting for the power," he said. "I'm not worried about the TV, I'm not worried about anything--the air conditioning or what. But I worry about my food in the freezer."
Gurmel has a large freezer in the garage, his kitchen refrigerator is full of holiday food, and he was particularly worried about his supply of beer for the 4th. The generator did the trick and the appliances were once again keeping things cold, but Gurmel's wife Shish still didn't know what to make of the outage.
"I don't know what happened. First time in 14 years," she said. "We've been living here 14 years, first time it happened."
In an afternoon briefing, PG&E said the unprecedented hot weather is to blame for all the outages.
"What we're going to see over the next seven days rivals our biggest heat waves that we've ever experienced in PG&E's service territory," said PG&E meteorologist Scott Strenfel.
Back in San Ramon, Kevin thought what happened in his neighborhood was the result of human error.
"This is their responsibility," he said. "They made the decision to turn the power off that then blew up an underground substation with equipment that doesn't work well in heat. Who architected that?"