Power Outages in South Bay

If your power goes out, you can call PG&E at 800-PGE-5002 to find out when it might get restored.

In the entire Bay Area: 1.5 Million lost power in this storm
In PG&E's service area: 677,000 lost power
Still out as of Friday night: Approx 165,000 (mostly in the North Bay)

There are 200-300 electricity poles and 200 miles of wire that are down across the Bay Area and it may take until next week to get power back up to everyone.

My parents' phone service is out in Morgan Hill. Who did people call when that happened before cell phones? Service has been out since yesterday and won't be restored until Monday. I'm glad our power hasn't gone out and our area doesn't seem to be too hard hit. PG&E was out yesterday and today to trim our neighbor's tree (when I heard a chainsaw, I was wondering who the heck was crazy enough to be out gardening in the storm). I'm not really sure why they waited til the day of the storm to do that. I guess they only have so many resources which makes being proactive rather than reactive difficult.

Why does the power keep going out for a few minutes at a time? Has happened 3x's since yesterday morning in Campbell/San Tomas area. It's just long enough for all the clocks to start blinking, which is really annoying. Trying to keep some perspective as many have been out of power for days but this seems kinda random. An explaination would be helpful.

Yeah, I've been wondering about the same thing myself. My guess is that they have to do that to switch equipment offline somewhere to work on it, but that's just a total uneducated guess.