Live map of yesterday’s power outages. If an area is red, PG&E still has it down as its electricity being out.

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Well, it was as the senator promised: PG&E turned the power back on to most of Humboldt County last night, as we slept. Humboldt County was first in to the great public safety power shutoff of 2019, and we were also first out.

But thousands of customers in the more rural parts of the county are still dark as of this writing. Most of them are along the Highway 96 corridor, from Willow Creek to Orleans. You should be able to pan and zoom on the constantly updating map above to see where power is still shut off and where it is back.

Hundreds of thousands of customers are still blacked out elsewhere in the state.

There are still lots of questions to answer, and the Outpost hopes to get at them in the coming days. Why did we get only 12 hours notice? Why was PG&E unable to use its power plant at King Salmon to power Humboldt County, most of which was under no threat of wildfire? Will it be able to do so in the future? Why did all of Humboldt have to go down, while in other counties the utility was able to target problem areas more precisely? (In Mendocino County, for example, the town of Willits never lost power, though nearby rural areas where there was a fire threat did.)

That’s all to come. This morning you may rejoice.

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