PG&E Activates Emergency Operations Centers to Support Carr Fire Response in Redding Area

07/27/2018

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) today activated multiple emergency operations centers to support the emergency response to the Carr Fire burning in Shasta County. PG&E’s first priority is the safety of customers, employees, contractors and the communities it serves.

PG&E is supporting first responders and local agencies, monitoring its gas and electric infrastructure, and providing mutual assistance to Redding Electric Utility, which provides electricity to approximately 44,000 customers in the City of Redding. To support response efforts, PG&E has activated its Emergency Operations Center at its San Francisco headquarters, its Gas Emergency Center in San Ramon, as well as a local support center near the wildfire.

Additionally, PG&E’s new Wildfire Safety Operations Center is fully staffed and continues to monitor active fires as well as other potential fire threats and weather conditions across PG&E’s service area in real time.

At the request of Cal Fire, PG&E has turned off power to some electric customers located outside the City of Redding as an emergency measure to support safety and firefighting efforts. To date, PG&E has turned off gas service for safety to approximately 500 customers, also at the request of Cal Fire. This count of gas customers impacted is expected to grow.

PG&E has a plan to deal with these situations and wants customers to be prepared and have plans, too, in the event of an electric or gas outage. Once in safe location, PG&E asks customers to take 5 minutes and update their contact info at www.pge.com/mywildfirealerts so they can be reached if necessary. Customers should call 911 or PG&E at 1-800-743-5000 to report a downed power line or if they smell gas.

In March, PG&E launched its Community Wildfire Safety Program to implement additional precautionary measures intended to reduce the risk of wildfire threats and strengthen communities for the future. In addition to establishing its new Wildfire Safety Operations Center, PG&E:

Added more than 50 new weather stations – with a total of around 200 planned in 2018 – to provide improved awareness of fire danger conditions and better predict where a wildfire could occur.
Enhanced vegetation management in high fire-threat areas to meet new state vegetation and fire safety standards and create safe space between trees, limbs and power lines.
Alerted more than 570,000 homes and businesses served by electric lines in extreme-fire threat areas that PG&E may have to shut off power for public safety if extreme fire danger conditions occur, as a last resort.

About PG&E

Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation (NYSE:PCG), is one of the largest combined natural gas and electric energy companies in the United States. Based in San Francisco, with more than 20,000 employees, the company delivers some of the nation’s cleanest energy to nearly 16 million people in Northern and Central California. For more information, visit www.pge.com/ and www.pge.com/en/about/newsroom/index.page.