To Victoria Hilton, 76, who lives in the Heavenly Oaks Mobile Home Park in the mountain community of Guatay in East San Diego County, the power shutoffs felt like an eternity.
She lost power for two days. She used battery-powered lamps to read at night and bathed in tepid water because her water heater couldn’t operate.
Hilton’s one of the lucky ones; she has a wood-burning stove to keep her home warm. She’s more worried for an older neighbor who has a chronic medical condition and no heat. Temperatures dropped below 40 degrees Wednesday night.
At least it’s not a wildfire.
“It’s challenging, but we do understand,” Hilton said. “We don’t want to be like L.A.”
Thousands of residents in San Diego County’s rural backcountry lost power this week as San Diego Gas & Electric shut off lines to prevent the risk of wildfire during high winds and dry conditions. Tens of thousands more were warned of possible further outages.
Such shutoffs are a “last-resort tool,” and SDG&E uses them only where “absolutely necessary” after carefully considering many factors, said spokesperson Candace Hadley.
But the shutoffs don’t come without health and safety risks of their own. For days, they can leave some of the county’s most vulnerable — including people on low incomes in rural communities, where resources are already more scarce — with no heat to stay warm, no hot water to bathe, no electricity to keep food cold and limited communication with the rest of the world.
Sometimes, it can even mean no water, since many rural wells are powered by electricity.
“It’s not a decision that we take lightly,” Hadley said. “This is something that year after year our SDG&E has worked to make this more and more refined, because truthfully we understand how difficult it is for customers to be without power.”
While shutoffs can be difficult for people, “they are so necessary for public safety,” Hadley said.
The shutoffs are happening in predominantly rural and mountainous areas, where several residents have fixed or low incomes, are older, live alone or have medical conditions.
And these most recent shutoffs are somewhat more unusual in that they are occurring during the wintertime, when temperatures are dipping into the 30s at night in the rural mountains.
“It’s not easy. The temperatures are getting cold at night, and it’s hard to stay warm,” said Andrea Sissons, the superintendent of Warner Unified School District, where some families’ power was out.
Some residents are better prepared for shutoffs than others, stocking up on supplies and procuring their own generators. But not everybody can afford a generator.
The new round of outages has cost rural school districts several days of instruction.
Mountain Empire Unified has lost seven days this school year as of Friday because of power shutoffs. That’s already more than the five closure days the district had budgeted for this school year. Any days beyond those five, the district can never make up.
“We can’t have school without electricity and without water,” Superintendent Pat Keeley said.
More than just the loss of school time, Keeley worries about students and their families.
“You can’t just go back right into your math class or your reading lessons after kids have been sitting in the dark for two nights and have been cold and hungry,” Keeley said. “For some people, this is a very challenging thing.”
Warner Unified didn’t lose power, but it still canceled school because the high winds made it too dangerous to drive the school buses that transport almost all its students.
Plus, many families’ neighborhoods lost power, leaving some parents unable to charge their phones — which would leave the school unable to reach them in an emergency.
In Bonsall Unified, which closed two schools for two days this week because of the shutoffs, Superintendent Heather Golly said the district was faring “fairly well under the circumstances.”
But the shutoffs were “definitely presenting some significant challenges for our schools and our families up here,” she added.
To mitigate the impacts, SDG&E set up community resource centers, from San Clemente to Campo, open to the public from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Those centers offered electric outlets to charge devices, plus gloves, hats, blankets, snacks and bottled water.
SDG&E says residents can call 211 if they have access or functional needs.
Before deploying power shutoffs, SDG&E also says it calls customers it knows depend on electricity for health and safety reasons, such as powering medical equipment, to ensure they’re prepared. If they don’t answer the phone, workers will stop by to check on them, Hadley said.
Power shutoffs by investor-owned utilities are a relatively new strategy that did not begin in California until 2018. The California Public Utilities Commission first granted investor-owned utilities like SDG&E permission to utilize power shutoffs as a public safety measure in 2012.
Electric utility infrastructure issues aren’t the cause of most wildfires, but they have been responsible for many of the most catastrophic ones, such as the 2018 Camp fire that destroyed the Northern California town of Paradise. And in 2007, a power line toppled by Santa Ana winds sparked the Witch Creek fire in San Diego County, which ended up killing two people and destroying more than 1,100 homes.
SDG&E has not had a utility-related wildfire in 15 years and has invested $6 billion in that time into wildfire prevention measures, ranging from artificial intelligence tools to more than 220 weather stations, Hadley said.
In 2018, it became the first investor-owned utility in California to deploy power shutoffs. It has deployed 18 since.
This season’s shutoffs have been relatively small in scope compared to previous years. The largest-scale shutoffs happened in 2020, when SDG&E shutoffs cut power to 89,000 customers.
Staff writer Jemma Stephenson contributed to this report.
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