As PG&E struggles to keep power running during an unprecedented heat wave, one neighborhood in San Ramon is facing the same problem.
The power went out at 6pm on Tuesday night, but by noon the next day there was still no power.
A line of PG&E trucks gathered on Bollinger Canyon Road in San Ramon. Nearby, temperatures had already topped 100 degrees and homes had been without power for more than 18 hours.
Neighbors said they were told their electricity had been shut off because of the forecasted 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 up a substation underground, which they confirmed with me today,” he said. “That had to do with, uh, ‘sensitive equipment underground,’ which can fail if it’s too hot. So then I said, if that happened last night at 11 o’clock, when did you send a crew? And they said, oh, a crew came at 9:15.”
PG&E confirmed that the heat had caused equipment to fail and they were working on replacing it, with a predicted repair time of 5 p.m. Wednesday. Larry Foster has lived in the neighborhood for more than 40 years without many problems.
“It’s happened before, but it always lasts an hour or two,” Foster said. “But it didn’t come back on until 11, and then it only stayed on for a few minutes. I only had time to reset one of the clocks and then it went back off.”
He spent the day with the house dark, trying to keep the remaining cool air inside. A block away, Gurmel Billion decided not to wait any longer. After five phone calls, his grandson brought a generator from work to try to save Gurmel’s food supply for the Fourth of July.
“The fan goes off. The air conditioning goes off. The freezer goes 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 anything. But I’m worried about my food in the freezer.”
Gurmel has a large freezer in the garage, his kitchen refrigerator is full of food for the holidays, and he was especially worried about his supply of beer for the 4th. The generator was working and the appliances were 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 lived here for 14 years, first time it happened.”
During an afternoon meeting, PG&E said the unprecedentedly warm weather is to blame for all the power outages.
“What we’re going to see over the next seven days is comparable to the largest heat waves we’ve ever seen in PG&E’s service area,” said Scott Strenfel, PG&E meteorologist.
Back in San Ramon, Kevin believed what happened in his neighborhood was the result of human error.
“This is their responsibility,” he said. “They made the decision to turn off the power, which then blew up an underground substation with equipment that doesn’t handle heat well. Who designed that?”
