Four days after a severe atmospheric river storm brought power to hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents, about 3,000 Pacific Gas & Electric customers in the region were left in the dark Saturday morning — but utility officials expected electricity to be fully restored by midnight.
About 1,500 customers were without power in the South Bay, while another 1,500 waited on the peninsula for the lights to come on. That’s less than nearly 7,000 in the entire Bay Area as of Friday afternoon.
Power was fully restored in the East Bay, North Bay and San Francisco, PG&E officials said.
At the height of the outage on Tuesday, some 367,000 customers were without power, leaving the utility with the most single-day outages since 1995. By noon on Thursday afternoon, that number had fallen below 38,000. According to the PG&E, the storm damaged at least 217 power poles and 157 transformers.
Yet another winter storm that was expected to push into the Bay Area Saturday night now looks like it will move further south, meteorologists said, downgrading the amount of rain in the forecast. About an inch of rain will fall in most cities in the region on Wednesday.
“We expect most of the rain to hit areas south of the Bay Area in the central to southern parts of California,” said Dial Hoang, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Bay Area.
Still, Hoang warned that gusts of up to 25 mph at lower elevations and 45 mph in the foothills and mountains could wreak havoc.
“Because the soil is so saturated, it’s much easier for the wind to knock down trees and power lines, so it’s really important that people prepare in case they have a power outage,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Central Coast — where severe winter weather has hammered levees that have caused devastating flooding — could also dodge the worst of the storm. About an inch of rain was expected on Wednesday, and no major waterways were predicted to reach a major flood phase.
Still, Hoang encouraged residents in flood-prone areas to prepare in case they need to evacuate.
“It doesn’t take a lot of rain to cause problems in some of these areas,” he said.
