Written Yesterday: The DrsC’s winter home is in the area of CA where the giant CA utility, PG&E, has turned off the electric power in the face of high fire danger conditions - low humidity and high winds. The power went off around midnight last night.
As I write this late Wednesday afternoon we’ve been living alongside our home which is basically unusable, in our RV which is usable as a “dry camping” unit, although not optimally so. The house is nearly all electric except for heating water and drying clothes. We’re on a well so no electric = no water.
The RV cooks and refrigerates with propane, and heats with it too. We have battery-powered lights and water pressure which will cover the couple of days this outage is scheduled to last, but our TV and microwave are not usable. We can live, but not be much entertained in a no-power RV.
Making the risky assumption plans don’t change, we should have power again about 24 hours from now. It will be welcome when it returns.
Fortunately we can charge our phones and iPads in either of our vehicles, both of which have a 110 volt AC outlet as well as USB DC outlets. Modern conveniences, or “mod cons” in Britslang, are nice extras.
We’ve lived in this area a good part of nearly each year for almost half a century, in that period the weather hasn’t changed appreciably. It stops raining here in May and doesn’t resume until November, plus the summers are hot, often over 100 F degrees. Therefore autumns here have always been tinder-dry with high fire danger.
Why we are only now having on-purpose power outages is unclear. A popular theory is that now-bankrupted PG&E has scrimped on maintenance to save $$ and the fires are a result.
It supposedly has been viewed as cheaper to pay off people injured by fire than to update their thousands of miles of mountain-area high voltage lines. Two or three mega-fires like those recently have proved that assessment badly wrong.
Perhaps they bet on only encountering white swans, and met a covey of black ones, eh?
