Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Californians could be at risk when utilities cut power to prevent wildfires during extreme weather.
Yet California has been plagued by repeated deadly fires in recent years, and many lawmakers view power shutoffs as a critical tool of last resort to prevent them. While officials urge the utilities to carefully scrutinize the need for shutoffs, failing to cut power in high-risk scenarios has the potential to be catastrophic.
Newsom and others agree that intentional outages could be reasonable in extreme circumstances when strong winds, hot temperatures and dry vegetation create conditions that have led to some of California’s most destructive wildfires. But concerns about how the shutoffs would be carried out grew last year when Southern California Edison and PG&E announced plans to develop their own outage policies and cut power more often.
The California Conference of Local Health Officers, a group of 61 county health officers formed in the 1970s to advise the state on public health issues, voted to send a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission raising concerns about power shutoff practices. Earlier this year, Relucio and her colleagues conducted their own tally of residents whose health depends on electrical equipment or who rely on refrigerated medications. The county, tapping into federal, state and local databases, discovered that PG&E’s internal list likely only covered about 10 percent of the residents who could have been at risk, Relucio said.
PG&E Electric, Edison and SDG&E collectively serve 343,000 “medical baseline” customers, the companies said. Public health officials say the nearly 600,000 residents who receive in-home support services from the state, which provides care to elderly, blind, or disabled people who cannot fully care for themselves, should also be considered vulnerable populations that need extra help before outages.
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