It is Saturday afternoon and we are told – by phone from PG&E, by email from PG&E and the County, and by text from PG&E and the County again – that our power will go out at about five. It is strange, getting ready for the power to go out. Run a last load of laundry, run the dishwasher, charge everything that can be charged – although there is charging available at the local Fire Department – and wait. It is a warm day, in the 80s, with only a hint of wind but, we are told, that will change on Sunday.
Our emergency plan is to go down to Redwood City for dinner and then see Downton Abby. We’ll come home in the dark, using our headlamps to get from the car to the house, go to sleep and wake up Sunday morning (presumably in the daylight). We have water and gas so we can function pretty close to normally during daylight hours but it will get old very fast if this lasts for more than 48 hours.
Anyway, not to “cast stones backwards” [as PGE’s latest flack-on-TV put it] but wouldn’t you rather have a Public Utility in the service of its consumers than a publicly traded utility in hock to its shareholders? “Casting stones backwards” probably means pointing out they should have been maintaining those lines instead of paying dividends and blaming the weather and forest management when things go wrong…
I’m not a fan of PG&E. Hmmm, cast stones backwards”, maybe that is like “now is not the time to talk about guns” after a shooting.