Recent text message:
PG&E Safety Alert: Due to weather forecast PG&E may turn off the power on 10/09/2019. Prepare a plan. More info…
After the catastrophic fires in Northern California the last couple of years, the regional electric company — Pacific Gas & Electric — is contemplating shutting down power for thousands of customers, yours truly included. This is to prevent a fallen line from starting a fire.
Checklist:
- Generator, check (but probably won’t use it)
- Battery-powered lights, check (and, yes, I’ll use them)
- Typewriter, check (manual, not electric)
- Good book, check (several, reading The Sport of the Gods presently)
I’m looking forward to possibly losing power. Nothing is more retro than a good (even planned) power outage.
© 2019, Mark Adams. All rights reserved.
Only in California, or a third world country, or when I used to live in VA, or Florida during hurricanes.
Just being a bit sarcastic. California is the only place that I know of though that has planned outages for other than changing out equipment. We rely on electricity for uninterrupted service that it is easy to forget we need some kind of plan for its failure. I never lived any place where there were not multiple days without power.
Hope you can type your way through any outages.
Yes, people in California are grateful that PG&E is taking precautions, but… and this is a big “but…” they would prefer line maintenance!
wacky – the electric here in my neighborhood is all run by the city government, the grid for about 3 miles in all directions from the center of the city is all generated by a single plant. Everywhere else is served by the Salt River Project, which is the huge PG&E-like generating concern. This means that while I do suffer a few hours of outage in any given year, it’s usually rock-steady, and there’s never been an outage that has lasted more than a few hours. Usually only dies when a substation gets taken out by a drunk in a truck or a lightning bolt. 😀