LOS ANGELES — Facing extreme wildfire conditions this week that included hurricane-level winds, the main utility in Northern California cut power to nearly 1 million people while its counterpart in Southern California pulled the plug on just 30 customers to prevent power lines and other electrical equipment from sparking a blaze.
Pacific Gas &Electric Co. avoided major wildfires during its outage, while Southern California Edison is trying to determine if one of its power lines started a massive fire that drove nearly 100,000 people from their homes in Orange County during fierce winds and extremely dry conditions early Monday.
“I don’t know why they did not shut power off,” said attorney Gerald Singleton, who has sued utilities for devastating wildfires caused by their equipment. “They seem to be still be operating as if climate change and all these things we’re dealing with are not a reality.”
The utility defended its decision not to institute a type of blackout used increasingly as a means of protecting residents after several devastating wildfires, including a 2018 inferno sparked by PG&E equipment that nearly razed the community of Paradise, killed 85 people and destroyed 19,000 homes and other buildings.
Edison spokesman Chris Abel said wind speeds in the mountains above the city of Irvine at the time had not reached the threshold to pull the plug on the power, though they did later in the morning when some electric circuits were cut.
“It’s not something that we take lightly,” Abel said of the decision to shut off electricity. “We know that not having power is a tremendous burden on our customers.”
The Silverado Fire broke out in gusty weather just before 7 a.m. Monday near Irvine, a city of 280,000 about 35 miles south of Los Angeles.
According to SoCal Edison’s report to state utility regulators, a “lashing wire” that ties a telecommunications line to a supporting cable may have come into contact with a separate 12,000-volt Edison conductor line above.
That blaze and the Blue Ridge Fire farther north in the county, which broke out several hours later in the brushy hills of Yorba Linda, kept more than 70,000 people from their homes Tuesday as winds returned, but not as strongly as the day before when they blew over tractor-trailers and grounded firefighting aircraft.
Two firefighters who battled the Silverado Fire remained in critical condition after suffering second- and third-degree burns over large portions of their bodies, Orange County Fire Authority Chief Brian Fennessey said.
“It’s tough for any firefighter, certainly any fire chief …, to feel this helpless when you’ve got part of our fire family fighting for their lives,” Fennessey said at a Tuesday news conference.
At least 10 homes were damaged and thousands of homes remained threatened as flames moved toward neighborhoods. There was little containment of the fires, though weather conditions were improving.
The fires moved with extraordinary speed and residents described the fear they felt when told to evacuate and then having to navigate through orange-tinted smoke.
Elizabeth Akhparyan Park and her husband, Tony, initially heeded the warning when smoke darkened their Irvine home even though they couldn’t see fire.
After joining their three children at her mother’s home in Tustin, they decided to return at night for more keepsakes.
They fled the second time with photo albums and her husband’s violin after seeing flames across the road.
