Well, it looks like the plan to put the Humboldt Bay Generating Station to use by generating power for Humboldt is a bust. Instead, we will follow most of the rest of the north state into the “public safety preventative shutdown,” whereby PG&E cuts electricity to over 800,000 customers in order to avert wildfire threat, starting at about midnight tonight.

Sean Quincey of the Humboldt County Office of Emergency Services spoke with the Outpost a few moments ago, after getting off a conference call with PG&E and others, and he reported that the last-ditch plan to keep our power on has failed.

“We know that the King Salmon plan is not going to solve all of our problems,” said Quincey. “We ideally wanted it to provide power to everyone who was going to lose power, but that is not going to happen.”

Instead, Quincey said, power from the King Salmon plant will be used to power critical facilities like hospitals and the jail and that’s it.

Quincey said that he was not clear about why the plan to plug the local power station into the local grid failed. But it has, and we’re all going to be in the dark for at least 36 hours and possibly longer, starting tonight.

Anything else? Quincey asked only residents who are suffering an immediate medical emergency to call 911. People with non-immediately critical medical needs — such as people wondering how they will power their breathing devices — to get their backup power in order and be in contact with their medical provider.

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