Edison International’s Southern California Edison said 278,572 customers in six counties near Los Angeles face blackouts within 48 hours due to a forecast of a strong Santa Ana wind event. The utility still had 55 customers switched off in Los Angeles County Sunday, according to Southern California Edison’s website.
PG&E Corp. said that it may need to cut service starting Monday night to about 21,000 customers living in the southern part of the state’s Central Valley and Sierra Nevada foothills.
These power cuts are extremely rare in the winter and the utilities have never warned of a possible shutoff of this size in January. The blackouts planned this week could affect about 900,000 people, based on the average size of the state’s households.
The unusual prospect of January shutoffs underscores how wild California’s weather has become as climate change brings about increasingly extreme warmth and drought. Last year, record temperatures took down large swaths of the state’s power grid and wildfires torched more acreage than ever before.
During a regular winter, public safety power shutoffs “would not be under consideration, but this winter has been anything but normal,” PG&E meteorologists said on the utility’s website. Only 22% of the average rainfall this winter has fallen in the southern Sierra, they said.
High winds, along with low humidity that has dried brush and grasses making them easier to burn, will create critical conditions Monday and Tuesday, the U.S. Storm Prediction Center said in a forecast. There’s a less severe elevated risk for Sunday.
While the winter months usually mark California’s rainy season, much of the state remains gripped by drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
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