Power restored to most Greenfield resident after second day of outages
GREENFIELD, Calif. (KION)
UPDATE 8/6/2021 3 p.m. Power appears to have been restored to most Greenfield residents after a second day of power outages in the area, according to a PG&E outage map.
According to the map, only about 11 customers are still without power.
A spokesperson for PG&E tells KION that Friday's outage affected about 5,253 customers starting at around 6:45 p.m. The spokesperson said the cause of the outage was a wire down at the Los Ositos substation. She said they are still investigating what caused the damage to the line.
Greenfield's City Manager, Paul Wood, says power outages in the city have been disruptive and a moving target.
"The problem is, we have residents, we have businesses that count on electricity. And if they're not going to have it, they kind of need to know how long they're going to be out so they know what to do with their investment in food and perishables that they have. And that's caused all kinds of problems," Wood said.
He says he understands that heavy fog, dust, lack of rain and wind can lead to outages when they come together, but he says he has been around the area for decades and has never seen anything like this. He said people who have been in the area longer have also considered it strange.
"If, in fact, it's those confluences of fog, dust, lack of rain and wind, if those are the real issues, we've got a lot of digging to do because there's no shortage of any of those things here. Right. We don't get much rain. There is a lot of dust. There's a lot of wind, and there is definitely fog. So, I mean, if that's what's causing things like this to happen, we need to have better answers for how we deal with them," he said.
Going forward, Wood says he believes there should be better communication and more evaluation of what is going on. He believes that if the outages were caused by weather conditions, there should be more routine power line maintenance to prevent more outages in the future and a deeper dive into the root cause of the issue.
PREVIOUS STORY: Pacific Gas and Electric reports that more than 5,000 customers in the Greenfield area are without power Friday morning.
This comes just a day after more than 7,000 customers were affected by outages in the Soledad, Greenfield and King City areas.
Lights begin to come back on for southern Monterey County residents affected by power outages
The utility reports that the outage started shortly before 7 a.m., and power is expected to be restored at around 2:30 p.m.
The cause of the outage is still under investigation. On Thursday, a spokesperson said an outage in Greenfield was caused by something called arcing. The utility said that when there is enough dust and other particulates in the air near power lines, it can create an arc and cause damage to power lines.
