On high fire warning days like these, when the temperatures are burning, the wind is whipping and the air is dry enough to crack lips, many residents of northern California’s wine country have a routine.
In communities scarred by wildfire, they know to be ready: ready for smoke-choked air and tear-stung eyes. Ready to pack up and go at a moment’s notice. Ready to lose it all, sometimes again.
This year, they added a new item to their checklists: ready to live without power, sometimes for days on end.
“When you’ve had to evacuate through flames and the sky is black and there’s fire all around you, it’s absolutely terrifying,” said Nancy Hallman, 65. “We need to do everything we can to clear, be ready, be vigilant, be careful. Turn off the lights if you have to.”
Hallman works at Howell Mountain Market and Deli in Angwin, a 4.9-square mile community nestled in the forested hills of the Napa county wine region, north of San Francisco. While a wildfire was raging less than 50 miles away and other areas in the region were hit by planned power shutoffs, life continued as usual in the brightly lit, air-conditioned store.
That’s because the store sits in the heart of one of two of Pacific Gas & Electric’s resilience zones, areas designed by the utility to be quickly isolated from the broader electric grid during shutoffs so that they can receive power from a PG&E-installed interconnection hub.
Earlier this month, PG&E cut power to more than 2 million people in an effort to prevent its power lines from sparking wildfires amid high-risk weather. On Wednesday, it began rolling blackouts that affected a half-million people, or nearly 180,000 customers, and warned that a second round of outages could occur over the weekend when even stronger winds are expected in the region.
The utility has presented the blackouts as an imperfect but necessary tool to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, and experts warn they could soon become the new normal during fire season in parts of the state. (PG&E declared bankruptcy in January, in part because of potential liabilities from its role in some of the 2017 northern California fires and the 2018 Camp fire.)
In January, PG&E announced that it would create its first resilience zone in Angwin. If blackouts are the utility’s stopgap solution to wildfires, then resilience zones are the answer to the challenges blackouts present in turn: portions of the grid that can keep going with mobile power generation when the rest of the power shuts off. PG&E hardened its infrastructure in Angwin to withstand high winds, with some lines undergrounded, and others upgraded, in order to “allow for important emergency and community services such as first responders, grocery stores, and gas stations to remain energized”.
Wildfires burning during a climate crisis means certain death and destruction. Resilience zones are a kind of mitigation strategy for the mitigation strategy. For PG&E, and for some local residents, this is California’s future.
“We have to adapt to the change,” said Gloria Kim, the 26-year-old store manager at the Ace Hardware in Angwin.
Kim has no power at her home in Angwin, but she spends most of her day at the hardware store, helping people pick up last-minute supplies.
“This is part of it now,” she said of the shutoffs. “We always have more batteries and flashlights, gas tanks and buckets on hands. We’re definitely bringing more generators in because people want to live their normal lives when the outages happen.”
Even after just the second shutoff of the month, the blackouts have begun to feel almost normal, Kim said. “The first day is when everybody is talking about it.” she said. “Now people are coming in regularly, getting more ice, more hot food from the deli.”
Petra Hartman used the resilience zone in Angwin for her real estate work during the shutoff, but she was unhappy about it. She typically works from home, and it’s a long distance to drive and use somebody else’s office. “It’s inconvenient,” Hartmans said.
“Last time, it was terrible,” she said. “This time I understand a little bit better why it has to be done. The wind was kind of tough. But I don’t know if it’s necessary to bring it in for the whole day. We don’t know when we’re going to have power.”
Kim lost her rental home in the Valley Fire in 2015. Everybody in this community, she said, has a personal experience with fire.
“I know there are a lot of upset people,” she said. “But in the end, I’d rather be in an outage than to have a fire happen because the power wasn’t shut off.”
Susie Cagle contributed reporting from Oakland
