TL;DR version: Northern California wildfire and PG&E shutdowns cause strange, apocalyptic “new reality”. Californians are not pleased with their electric company.
Hi Everyone! I’m in the North (SF) Bay. Most of Marin and large portions of Sonoma County are without power. Schools are closed and town are ghost towns spotted with businesses, like Costco, that have generators. Some businesses have stayed open in a twilight capacity, without lights and some services. Most grocery stores and families have lost everything in their freezers. Ice, batteries, and bottled water are hot commodities. There are places (community centers) to charge phones and small devices, but only a couple and the wait can be long. I know there are resources for people who are hungry, but we are fortunate not to need those. I live about 30 miles from the fireline. There is not much help here for evacuees without power. In the past, the churches and others opened as shelters and fed people during the fires. Many people stayed with family and friends in the powered down houses. It’s like unplanned camping. In your house. With guests. We lost power for 48 hours, have it back now, but only for 24 hours, and then another planned shutdown for another day or two or? Those who didn’t know anyone had to go to San Francisco or Richmond to find a place to stay. Of course there were a few large shelters in Marin, but they were full before they were even announced. Hundreds of thousands of people displaced.
We actually feel fortunate as 50% of our town is still without power. They expect their outage will be Saturday-Wednesday continuous. Cell phones do not behave well during a widespread outage, as many towers require electricity to run and are not properly backed up. It has been very difficult getting up to date information for us because of the outage. We had a guest and his dog visit us for a couple of days. His evacuation has been lifted and he returned home to no power today. We have also been lucky that we have a gas stove that had continued to work.
The positives are community building, unplugged family time, etc.