Turning on the lights

Shortly after 4 a.m. on Jan. 4, in the early hours of a pounding wind and rain storm, a primary span of power line is blown down, cutting power to Steve Goodwin and his neighbors along Mocha Lane in the Coffee Park neighborhood of northwest Santa Rosa.

A PG&E truck would be on the scene within 30 minutes, checking for dangerous conditions and monitoring the lines throughout the day. But it would be three days before power would return.

Hours later, at 11:51 a.m., tree branches strike a 12,000 volt power line across town in Rincon Valley, cutting electricity to Kathleen Magowan and her ailing husband, Don. Bennett Valley is also out, numbered among the 58,000 Sonoma County homes and businesses that lost power from downed lines.

Over the span of seven days beginning

Jan. 4, an estimated 866 separate outages affected 106,810 residents across the North Coast.

Residents said there was little surprise that winds hitting 70 mph would cause outages. But as the cold dark hours turned into cold dark days last week, criticism -- and questions -- mounted.

Why did power remain out for so many for so long?

Why were PG&E's restoration estimates off by days?

Who is setting the priority to restore power and what is the criteria for who goes first?

"It's so dynamic that we have to be flexible enough to respond to the highest priority," said Anthony Mar, superintendent of maintenance and construction for PG&E's North Coast Division and the man at the center of the storm.

Hazardous situations are addressed first, followed by the need to get power restored to emergency agencies, including hospitals. The size of the outage and ability of PG&E to keep power to main lines also is a priority weighed from the "storm room" at PG&E's Santa Rosa service center on Occidental Road.

Here, Mar oversees a staff that includes 12 people working at computers to track and update repairs throughout the company's local network. He and his team of supervisors decide where the workforce concentrates its efforts.

A circuit map of the Sonoma County electrical system covers a wall. A mounted wide-screen television is permanently set on the Weather Channel.

Information pours into the room from call centers in Fresno and Sacramento, which increased staff during the height of the storm.

Operators at the call center have access to the storm room database, enabling the phone operators to provide information. But PG&E officials said information is constantly changing and are only estimates.

The information is based on assessments from field workers calling Mar and his team. That means the information can change with the next wind gust.

Under normal conditions, establishing priorities to restore power is simple, Mar said. A priority list with about a half dozen guidelines places reconnecting individual customers below such things as repairing substations, transmission lines, clearing downed power lines and ensuring that hospitals and emergency responders all have power.

But last week hundreds of locations were identified as needing crews.

At Mocha Lane in northwest Santa Rosa, first on the scene was the "Trouble Man" at 4:50 a.m. The worker makes sure the line is safe, clears damage and works until notifing officials in the storm room of the damage. A repair order, one of hundreds throughout the county, is then sent out. Crews would not arrive here, however, until 3 p.m. the next day.

The guidelines set the priority:

After public safety is assessed and emergency agencies restored, crews check generation facilities to make sure the original power source, the power plant, is operating.

They repair transmission lines that feed hundreds of substations.

They repair substations, which convert high-voltage power for home use.

Distribution lines are repaired; these are the life-lines between substations and neighborhoods with anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 homes.

They repair tap lines, which branch into pockets of between 20 and 300 homes.

Only then are outages that repair small numbers, particularly in hard-to-get-to areas, restored.

"This is the most difficult and time-consuming step," said PG&E spokeswoman Jana Schuering. "But before we can connect individual homes, we must complete the previous steps."

The crew that arrived at Mocha Lane at 3 p.m. on the Saturday after the storm did its repairs. But more technical work was required by a separate crew. That crew -- the third -- would arrive another day later.

At 12:30 p.m. Monday, power was finally restored. A fourth crew would arrive at 5:30 that night for additional work after the power was back on.

"When we make the initial site visit or investigation of what happened, we don't know what to expect. We don't know what materials are going to be required and we don't know the extent of the potential damage that could be done," Schuering said.

She said criticism that PG&E did not have enough crews discounts the severity of the storm, which she said covered the majority of PG&E's service area.

Tuesday, when Mocha Lane residents received their power, 150 field crew members were working in Sonoma County, 20 of whom were either contract employees or PG&E workers brought in from outside the area.

"The wind that was here, it was like being out in a hurricane," Mar said.

The storm caused outages that affected 2.5 million across the state. PG&E officials said that since 1996, the utility has maintained a steady field crew work force of about 3,200 employees.

A year before that, the company stopped a major reorganization that had shed 3,000 jobs companywide. About 800 jobs in PG&E's customer energy services unit were spared after devastating storms earlier in 1995 pointed to vulnerabilities in PG&E's ability to respond to widespread outages.

Eric Wolfe, communications director for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 1245, said it's too early to tell what role PG&E's staffing levels played in its response to last week's storm.

"The union has ongoing concerns about the level of staffing at PG&E and its effect on maintenance," said Wolfe. "However, any major storm is going to cause outages and there is no way to know at this early date if any of the outages are due to shortcomings in maintenance."

Mike Burns, an apprentice lineman from Bakersfield, was among the half dozen or more workers involved in a repair on Deer Meadow Lane in Occidental, where power was out for four days. Burns said he was in Sonoma County by the afternoon of Jan. 4, the first day of the storm, and has since lost track of the number of repair jobs he's done.

By last Wednesday, Burns said he was on his third 36-hour shift, which gives workers only eight hours between shifts.

"If you've never worked 36 hours straight, you'd never understand," he said, just before he helped a fellow worker carry an 80-pound wooden crossbeam up a road.

Burns sympathized with those who had been out of power for days.

"Be patient," he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com.