UPDATE: The power outage affecting central and south Bakersfield has expanded to over 4,500 residents. No word on when power will be restored.
Many Kern County residents are without power as a strong storm rolled through Southern California on Monday.
According to PG&E, there are over 2,500 people in Bakersfield without power, and 2,600 in Kern County.
PG&E issued the following statement regarding the power outages:
Since the storm arrived in the early hours of Sunday morning, approximately 380,000 customers have lost power. That’s about 7% of the utility’s 5.5 million electric customers. We want to thank our customers for their patience as our crews work safely and as quickly as possible to restore power, and apologize for the inconvenience that these extended outages has caused.
As of 6 p.m. Sunday evening, power has been restored for approximately 250,000 of those customers and approximately 130,000 customers remain impacted.
PG&E’s response includes opening our system-wide Emergency Operations Center as well as four regional storms centers and 20 local storm centers. There are approximately 3,000 electric and tree crews on the job, including distribution and transmission line crews; troublemen and women, which are the utility industry’s first responders to an outage; inspectors; and vegetation crews. Hundreds more employees are staffing the storm centers, performing safety duties, delivering needed equipment to PG&E yards and more.
Those crews were pre-positioned to be in place where PG&E’s in-house meteorology team had forecasted that storm impacts would be most severe.
Additionally, PG&E has requested mutual assistance from nearby utilities to ensure that customers are restored safely and as quickly as possible. Crews from San Diego Gas & Electric are expected to arrive by Tuesday.
This is a developing story. More information as it becomes available.
