As temperatures soared over the weekend, thousands of PG&E customers in the Bay Area experienced power outages, with weather cited as the main cause, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The first significant heat wave of the summer saw temperatures topping 100 degrees in some areas, leading to widespread power disruptions in communities primarily in the East and South Bay regions, places like Richmond, Orinda, and Boulder Creek facing the most severe outages.
While the utility company did not provide specific details about how the heat wave was connected to the outages, the National Weather Service declared a heat advisory for the inland Bay Area and Central Coast, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. PG&E's critical outage map showed nearly 2,000 customers in Richmond and close to 3,500 customers in the area stretching from Orinda to Lafayette without power on Sunday evening. Equipment failures were blamed for blackouts affecting 130 customers north of Napa, while workers were still trying to determine the cause of the outages impacting nearly 1,000 customers in Boulder Creek.
Improvements were seen throughout Sunday evening, as ABC7 News reported that at one point, over 10,000 families and businesses were left without electricity. However, by late Sunday, the number of affected customers had reduced considerably; PG&E reported 10,560 customers without power across the Bay Area, with 10,149 of those customers in the East Bay. A company spokesperson said at that time that the outages were still "under investigation but the cause was likely heat-related."
The impact of these outages was felt by businesses and residents alike, as shown by several incidents; one of the most noticeable was the power going out at the Orinda Theater during an afternoon movie showing on their "busiest weekend since Top Gun Maverick," as the theater owner and operator Derek Zemrak described in an email, according to NBC Bay Area. Over 160 people were in the theater when the electricity cut out, abruptly ending their movie experience. The power outage affected about 3,444 customers in Orinda alone.
