PG&E power outage was 'a big screw you' to California, lawmaker says

With the threat of another power outage looming, state lawmakers hammered Pacific Gas & Electric at the state Capitol on Monday for botching shut-offs that left millions of Californians in the dark this fall and blamed the company for failing to upgrade its system over time.

A four-day outage in early October had an estimated impact of $50 million to $70 million in Sonoma County alone, said Mark Bodenhamer, the chief executive of the Sonoma Valley Chamber of Commerce. William Johnson, the chief executive of PG&E, acknowledged that the company fumbled the shutoffs last month but said the outages were necessary to protect public safety. He said that wildfire threat in PG&E’s service territory has increased at a “rate that few could imagine,” from less than 15% of its area at elevated risk of wildfire in 2012 to more than 50% today.

“But the fact is no amount of vegetation clearing can prevent catastrophic wildfires or wind-blown debris from hitting and impacting our wires,” Johnson said. “I want to assure you of this: We do not expect an annual repeat of what we went through this October,” Johnson said. “We’re working to narrow the scope and duration of future safety shutoffs and minimize the customer impact as much as possible.”

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