PG&E is no longer planning to cut power to customers in the Bay Area. The utility removed all Bay Area counties from its list of counties that will be impacted by this week's safety shutoffs.
The National Weather Service has issued a Red Flag Warning as hot and dry conditions could cause wildfires, but the utility says it is no longer necessary to cut power in the Bay Area.
"Our meteorologists were tracking the weather very closely. And the weather just did not materialize in the way that we expected; the strength was lower than anticipated," explained PG&E spokeswoman Tamar Sarkissian.
Still, some 32,000 customers homes and businesses throughout nine Northern California counties lost electricity because of the weather conditions, with most of those outages near Chico and Redding.
PG&E has continuously scaled back its estimate for how many customers would ultimately be impacted, from 54,000 at its peak to 32,000. Earlier estimates indicated that as many as 7,000 Bay Area customers could lose power.
Meanwhile, emergency officials are getting preparations in order in the event of wildfire.
"Trying to put equipment ahead of the fire on areas where science tells us we're likely to have events," said Brian Ferguson, spokesman for the California Office of Emergency Services. "So we have a fire truck out this week in Lake, Napa, Sonoma county, several other counties in California where we're prepositioning strike teams of multiple engines."
The warning is in effect until 8 a.m. Friday for the North Bay Mountains, East Bay hills and valleys, the Santa Cruz Mountains and the San Mateo coastline.
