A safety measure by PG&E to ward off wildfires has upset many people in Santa Cruz who have repeatedly had to deal with unscheduled power outages.
The utility company has a system in place to automatically shut off power if it appears there could be a threat of fire from a line, however, that system has recently led to a number of random power outages in the Santa Cruz mountains, leaving residents wanting answers.
"We’re not NIMBYs up here, we’re used to dealing with stuff," mountain resident Derrick Horton said. He explained that the issue lies with a device known as the reclosers which monitors sensitivity to the lines before switching power off. For 98 miles of line running through the community, there is only one monitoring device.
"They need to add more reclosers to more neighborhoods, say 13 or 14 more, one for each neighborhood, and that way they can turn the sensitivity down," he said.
In a statement issued to KCBS Radio, PG&E claimed that’s exactly what they are doing ー updating the settings to allow better coordination between the devices and fine-tuning the sensitivity which will help reduce the size and length of outages.
Despite PG&E's objective to reduce fire risk, Horton said he finds it hard to believe it’s about safety. "They would have replaced all these old wooden cracked polls with new fiber polls that they’re putting in some locations," he argued. "To us it’s very obvious that they’re doing the bare minimum they have to do."
A frustrated resident took to Twitter on Sept. 10 to point out that each time there is an outage home generators are forced to run and well pumps don’t work, causing many homes to lose water and creating a fire risk. He said he has already experienced seven power outages in the past month.
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