We were not prepared to support the operational event. This will improve.
-PG&E CEO Bill Johnson

This is not, from my perspective, a climate change story as much as a story about greed and mismanagement over the course of decades, neglect, a desire to advance not public safety but profits.
-Gavin Newsom, Governor of California 

A story on the news today says that a group of PG&E executives and fifty of their best customers stockholders partied at the Silver Oak winery on the very day their company was turning off the power to thousands of customers. I can imagine there were good reasons why no names were mentioned.

That is apparently going to be the official line from PG&E, acknowledging the fact that the crashing website, inconsistent maps and overwhelmed call centers provided  insufficient resources for people struggling to make do without an essential service in parts of 34 counties. It was made, not really as an apology but  in response to an attack from the governor.  It would seem that he has forgotten that the whole 'operational event' was their idea. 

I am publishing the full page ad which has been running in the newspaper and on television for weeks. I checked once or twice with the website address which promised maps, but only once did I actually find a map there, and it was about as legible at the photo on this page. This ad, such as it is, also seems to place the onus on people whose power is being cut.

We were having dinner again at Dana and Jim's last night when Dana got a message from the school where she teaches saying that the lights would be on and all hands should be on deck this morning. Their power was on this morning, but we were still stumbling around in the cold and dark with buckets of water and fading flashlights.

Someone in class this morning said that according to a PG&E lineman friend,  we are on the grid that extends over the  mountains behind us into Calistoga, and it would be 9pm before they coluld check all their lines and bring our power came back online. 

 I sat in the car in the parking lot and tried to catch up on a few comments while I had wifi, and then  came home and threw out everything that was in the fridge and cleaned it. All with no water. I felt pretty guilty about throwing away a lot of half filled jars, but then thought, 'goddammit' I don't have any water....I don't know how many people whose power was cut are on wells, but it's not a trivial number, yet not once, in any news story or PG&E communication was the fact that the majority of people with well water rely on electrical pumps for their water. To me this is the biggest hardship, especially if the outage lasts more than a few hours. 

While I was doing that OilMan was talking to the solar panel installer about options for powering the well pump during an outage. The only way to be completely independent of the power company is to have enough battery power to power everything, and this would, at this point be prohibitively expensive, so it looks like we will be investing in a generator until the storage battery technology improves.

We were sitting in the living room with two sleeping dogs when things started beeping all around the house, and the power was back on again. We tracked down the source of the strange noise in the laundry room (the tankless water heater booting up) and made sure everything else was working. I saw the AT&T truck down by the power pole making sure everything on their side was working correctly. Then OilMan's car started honking. All he could think of was that it got too hot parked in the driveway where both cars have been living since the garage door openers don't work.

Now we have to go to the store and replace all the food we threw out.