Bennett Valley residents have been left in the dark over and over this year

Craig Harrison has lived in Bennett Valley for 20 years. Power outages have always been a part of life in the rural Santa Rosa area, but this year, they’ve become more than a monthly occurrence. Between September and November alone, the lights went out seven times by his count.

“It’s fair to say that you have a lot of very annoyed customers out this way,” Harrison told me.

Without notice, power to more than 800 households curling around Trione-Annadel State Park might go out for a few minutes or almost a full day. One October outage left over 1,200 east Santa Rosa residents in the dark for 20 hours.

It can be more than an annoyance.

“In my house, if I don’t have electricity, that means my well doesn’t work. After a time you can’t flush a toilet. You don’t have lights, and most of your phones don’t work,” Harrison said. “Life gets very primitive very quickly.”

The situation could be dire for for unprepared residents who rely on electricity for medical devices or motorized wheelchairs.

Harrison installed an expensive battery as a source of backup power, but the constant disruption feels unacceptable and unjustifiable.

“We’re rural, but we’re not in the middle of nowhere,” he said.

As a longtime member of the Bennett Valley Community Association, Harrison has worked to get answers from their power supplier, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., with unsatisfying results.

“Why,” he asked, “are we supposed to stay in the dark and be happy, both in terms of information and literally?”

Around Labor Day, during a hot spell, a power outage in the middle of the night lasted well into the next day.

“You never know when it will come back on,” Harrison told me. “What happened, and where was the problem? I just want to understand this stuff.”

PG&E spokesperson Megan McFarland agreed: “The number of outages experienced by our customers in Bennett Valley is unacceptable, and we apologize for the disruption they caused. We also understand that members of the Bennett Valley community are frustrated with communication from PG&E regarding planned work in the area – we promise to do better on that as well.”

At issue in many of these outages is PG&E’s new Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings, a wildfire prevention system the company recently rolled out that automatically turns off power within one-tenth of a second if something like a tree strikes a line.

By shutting down power quickly, the program, now in its first full year after a pilot, is meant to help stop wildfires before they start, especially in high fire risk areas across most of Sonoma County.

According to PG&E, the new settings led to an 80% decrease in ignitions in 2021 compared to the prior three-year average.

The problem is the system also can be triggered by potentially less hazardous weather and vegetation interference or birds and other animals crossing with the power lines, or, in more than 15% of instances between July and September in Sonoma County, unknown causes.

Before power can be restored, PG&E crews have to identify the issue and inspect for any damage ― a task done by foot, truck or helicopter in daylight hours that can sometimes be hindered by bad weather conditions.

“I think it’s a great idea, but they didn’t follow through,” said Jeremy Nichols who has lost power 13 times since February.

Bennett Valley is far from the only community across the utility’s service area to be subject to the system’s shortcomings as the kinks are worked out. PG&E outage reports show 750,230 unique customers lost power due to the fast trip settings this year through October.

“It would be nice if they could make our system a little more reliable and able to tolerate some of these things without going down. I recognize the fire danger, too,” Nichols said.

“We sat on the morning of October 9, 2017, and watched the hillside burn. It was really scary, so we don’t want that either, but there needs to be a way of protecting us without making people go without power for hours of at a time.”

Nichols has a generator, but he worries for those who don’t have alternative power, especially in high summer heat and during cold winter nights. “It’s very concerning,” he told me.

And, each time he runs his propane generator, he thinks about the carbon dioxide he has to release.

While the system is designed to reduce wildfire disasters, giving residents more peace of mind, the frequency of outages has instead heightened some concerns over safety and access to emergency services.

If internet and cell service or landlines go down, “now there's no way for the county to warn you of an impending emergency,” said Bennett Valley resident Tim Bosma, who has documented numerous outages since April affecting anywhere from 840 to 1,160 households.

That’s something also on the mind of Chris Godley, director of emergency management for Sonoma County. “When we lose power, we lose the capacity to respond to hazards like wildfires and provide alert and warning,” he said.

How will the automatic shutdown system respond in a major wind event during a high fire risk period when crews might be too busy addressing damage elsewhere to inspect and reenergize lines quickly, he wonders. What would happen in an earthquake?

“This is the realm we live in,” Godley told me. “What’s the law of unintended consequences when we start implementing technologies like this?” He noted PG&E failed to notify the county ahead of rolling out the new program.

Unlike public safety power shutoffs, where PG&E provides warning before powering down parts of the system to avoid sparking wildfires--which came with its own criticism--there’s no advanced notice for these new types of outages.

That’s why the county, along with other jurisdictions, public officials and advocacy groups are pushing the California Public Utilities Commission to regulate the new system PG&E and other major electric utilities have started implementing.

“Fast-trip is not a small or low-impact wildfire mitigation program. It directly interferes with communities’ ability to care for and educate constituents and presents a public health threat to our state’s most vulnerable citizens,” counsel for the counties of Sonoma, Marin, Napa, San Luis Obispo and the City of Santa Rosa along with clean power providers and the Rural County Representatives of California wrote in a Dec. 14 letter to the president of the Public Utilities Commission.

The letter noted that more than 127,000 PG&E customers who require access to power for medical needs, almost 89,000 who use life support equipment and 179 hospitals lost power in 2022.

“There is not enough information available about PG&E’s operations or the impacts of its claimed improvements, nor is there a robust regulatory framework to ensure accountability,” the coalition wrote.

In an early November webinar to address Sonoma County resident concerns, PG&E touted the benefits of the enhanced power line safety settings while also recognizing a serious need to improve the system.

They pointed to various efforts underway and being ramped up to increase reliability, including installing technology to help quickly identify outage locations, adjusting sensitivity settings, prioritizing vegetation management, sectioning equipment to limit the number of people affected by an outage event and installing animal guards.

McFarland noted that the automatic shutoffs are only enabled when there is wildfire risk, which has now decreased with the recent rain and the arrival of winter.

She said, too, that the company is in the process of setting up an in-person town hall for Bennett Valley customers to take questions and communicate changes to the system, likely early next year.

Beyond the adjustments to the new power line settings, McFarland added, PG&E has scheduled significant vegetation maintenance for Bennett Valley in 2023 and has developed a more precise and communicative process for handling planned outages for company work, another source of community complaints.

In the meantime, PG&E customers experiencing outages should see if they qualify for various offerings, like generator and battery rebates, portable batteries for medical devices or backup power transfer meters, a tool that lets users control generators directly through their circuit breaker panels instead of running extension cords.

As I was wrapping up the reporting for this article, Harrison wrote to update me.

“Since we last spoke, we were out about 3 hours on Saturday morning and just went out again about 10 minutes ago,” he wrote in an early evening email Monday. “Thank goodness we have battery backup.”

“Guess what, the power’s out again,” Bosma also texted just after 6 p.m. Monday about the outage that affected 1,100 customers. “Only 20 minutes off this time...Fingers crossed that it stays on long enough to finish fixing dinner.”

On Thursday, it happened two more times.

“In Your Corner” is a column that puts watchdog reporting to work for the community. If you have a concern, a tip, or a hunch, you can reach “In Your Corner” Columnist Marisa Endicott at 707-521-5470 or marisa.endicott@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @InYourCornerTPD and Facebook @InYourCornerTPD.