Atmospheric River Storm Begins to Move Out of Southern Portion of PG&E’s Service Area

Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s (PG&E) Emergency Operations Center and hundreds of crews continue assessing damage, making needed repairs and restoring power in the aftermath of a major atmospheric river storm that delivered damaging winds, record rain totals, flooding and debris flows over the course of the weekend and Monday. The storm was one of the most potent to hit Northern and Central California in over a decade.

Since the storm began early Sunday, approximately 630,000 customers lost power which is about 10% of the utility’s 5.5 million electric customers.

As of 5 p.m. Monday evening, power has been restored to approximately 92% or 580,000 of those customers. Approximately 50,000 customers remain impacted.

PG&E continues to respond with approximately 3,000 electric and tree personnel on the job, including distribution and transmission line crews and troublemen and women, who are the utility industry’s first responders to an outage. Hundreds more employees are staffing the storm centers, performing safety duties, delivering needed equipment to PG&E yards and more.

While crews were pre-positioned to be in key locations in advance of the storm, they are now being moved and redeployed to the hardest areas of damage such as Sonoma, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties which were ground zero for much of the damage.

Mutual Aid assistance crews from San Diego Gas & Electric are expected to arrive Tuesday.

Record Rain and Wind

The record-breaking rain combined with strong winds produced the most storm-related impact seen in the PG&E territory in the month of October dating back to 2009. Downtown Sacramento at 5.44 inches broke a rainfall record that dated back to 1880. Blue Canyon received 10.4 inches of rainfall surpassing a record that dated back to 1964. Mount Tamalpais received 17 inches of rain. The strongest wind gust recorded was 92 mph in Alameda County. There were a number of other gusts that exceeded 70 mph across Santa Clara, Marin, Plumas, Contra Costa, Placer, San Mateo, Butte, and Napa counties.

PG&E’s stand is simple, that everyone and everything is safe. With that in mind, crews will continue to work overnight Monday and into the week until all customers are restored.

Keeping Customers Informed

While the storm has moved out of many areas, it is still impacting areas like Fresno, Bakersfield and San Luis Obispo.

PG&E knows how important it is to keep its customers informed. Customers can view real-time outage information on its website outage center and search by a specific address, by city or by county. This site has been updated to include in-language support for 16 languages.