SONOMA COUNTY (KRON) — Business owners in Sonoma County lost money because they were forced to close their doors during last week’s PG&E power shutoffs.
Parents had to miss work to stay home to watch their kids since schools were shut down and at least 17 car accidents were tallied in Sonoma County alone because of signal lights out.
Supervisor Shirlee Zane says there were other injuries attributed to half the county going dark.
“And some of them were very serious. And we also know that there have been reports of seniors falling and ending up in the hospital, so there’s really a whole ripple of domino effects given the power outage,” Zane said. “We feel it was not justified and irresponsible of PG&E.”
The supervisor says the county is conducting a survey to get a handle on the scope of the economic impact of the outage.
She says the county also racked up additional costs.
“We had to spend a lot of extra money in terms of keeping our emergency operation center open, declaring an emergency disaster because of the shutdown, all the additional staff hours that went into our health,” she said.
She says they tried to embed someone from Sonoma County into PG&E’s emergency operations crisis center but were shut out until after the peak of the emergency.
If there is to be a next time, she wants to make sure someone from Sonoma County to be there.
“To really work with us and be partnering with us and that’s what we feel that they really failed at,” Zane said.
PG&E says last week’s unprecedented public safety power shutoff shows that such a move can be effective.
On Saturday the utility says they found 50 cases of weather related damage done to lines during their inspections before restoring power.
They say over the next few days they will be scrutinizing their performance to identify how they improve.
PG&E says they recognize that public safety power shutoff can create real hardship for people but given the choice between hardship and safety they will always choose safety.