Thomas Fuller

Around 600,000 customers were still without power Thursday afternoon and there was no clear indication of when it might be restored. That uncertainty heightened residents’ anger as food spoiled and businesses and schools stayed closed.

But the biggest fears were for the sick and older residents and those who rely on medical devices and equipment like electric wheelchairs.

“Not having power impacts everyone, obviously,” said Sunday Parker, who uses a wheelchair and lives in Oakland, parts of which were affected by the shutdown. “But for people with disabilities it can be life or death.”

Although many medical facilities said they had prepared for the outage — ordering extra oxygen tanks and installing generators, for example — the uncertain timing of the blackout spawned confusion. Pacific Gas &amp; Electric, the utility that turned off the power, wavered on when it would start the blackout a number of times before the second stage of power cuts finally came late Wednesday. The first stage, which had cut power for around 500,000 residents, had come earlier that day.

Most of the concern was focused on people living on their own at home. Although more than 200 hospitals sit in the blackout zones, none have reported any significant effects on their patient services.

On a gusty day when a number of wildfires were reported across the state, firefighters remained on alert.

Steve Anderson, a meteorologist with the National Service, said average wind gusts in the San Francisco Bay Area reached 40 to 60 mph on Wednesday and Thursday. But Friday, he said, would bring relief. “Winds will be dying down dramatically,” Anderson said.

More gentle winds are a key factor in reducing fire hazards, allowing Pacific Gas &amp; Electric to turn the power back on. But it remains unclear how long some people will have to wait to fully regain electricity.

Thousands of customers in parts of Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino and Kern counties were also without power Thursday afternoon after Southern California Edison, the state’s second-largest investor-owned utility after PG&amp;E;, began implementing planned outages. Nearly 174,000 customers across nine counties in Central and Southern California have been notified about possible shut-offs.

This article originally appeared in

Power Cuts in California Put Vulnerable in Danger

MORAGA, Calif. — The decision to turn electricity off for large areas of Northern California has inconvenienced and frustrated hundreds of thousands of residents, but it also has become increasingly dangerous for the state’s most vulnerable.

“All of a sudden, I was like, ‘I can’t breathe,’” he said.

The decision to turn electricity off for large areas of Northern California inconvenienced and frustrated hundreds of thousands of residents, but it became increasingly dangerous for people like Faus and the state’s most vulnerable.

“Not having power impacts everyone obviously,” said Sunday Parker, who uses a wheelchair and lives in Oakland, parts of which were affected by the shutdown. “But for people with disabilities it can be life or death.”

Most of the concern was focused on people living on their own at home. Although more than 200 hospitals sit in the blackout zones, none have reported any significant effects on their patient services, said Jan Emerson-Shea, a spokeswoman for the California Hospital Association.

Hospitals in the state are required to have backup generators, which usually start running within seconds of a power failure, Emerson-Shea said.

Across the region, the power shut-off made for odd juxtapositions. In some places, a road separated those with power and those without. At the Sequoias in Portola Valley, a retirement home in the hills above Silicon Valley, only one phone was functioning and the facility had only partial power from a generator. Cellphone service was down. But in the valley below, tech companies like Google and Apple operated with full power.

And in Woodside, a wealthy suburb above Silicon Valley, residents used generators to keep their wine collections cool and sent out notices offering to store their neighbors’ best bottles.

On a gusty day when a number of wildfires were reported across the state, firefighters remained on alert. The combination of strong winds and dried-out vegetation after the long California summer has brought on peak fire season. It was during similar conditions two years ago that fires tore through wine country north of San Francisco.

Steve Anderson, a meteorologist with the National Service, said average wind gusts in the San Francisco Bay Area reached 40 to 60 mph on Wednesday and Thursday. But Friday, he said, would bring relief.

“Winds will be dying down dramatically,” Anderson said.

More gentle winds are a key factor in reducing fire hazards, allowing Pacific Gas &amp; Electric to turn the power back on. But the company says it may take five days before the power lines are completely re-energized, and it remains unclear how long some people will have to wait to fully regain electricity.

PG&amp;E;’s power shut-offs are part of the company’s wildfire safety program, which the utility developed in response to state requirements put into place after the wine country fires.

Strong winds and dry conditions have been implicated in several major California wildfires started by PG&amp;E;’s equipment. The company has said that one of its transmission lines probably started the state’s largest wildfire known as the Camp Fire, which killed 86 people and destroyed the town of Paradise in November last year.

Although PG&amp;E; and at least one other utility has carried out these so-called preventive power cuts previously, this week’s shut-off was by far the largest.

Thousands of customers in parts of Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino and Kern counties were also without power Thursday afternoon after Southern California Edison, the state’s second-largest investor-owned utility after PG&amp;E;, began implementing planned outages.

Nearly 174,000 customers across nine counties in Central and Southern California have been notified about possible shut-offs, said Mary Ann Milbourn, a spokeswoman for the utility.

On Thursday afternoon, as Santa Ana winds whipped through Southern California, a wildfire erupted in Calimesa, about 75 miles east of Los Angeles in Riverside County, and bore down on the Villa Calimesa mobile home park. Authorities issued mandatory evacuation orders, and warned of a threat to the power grid and a nearby railway line. There were also several other smaller fires burning in Southern California.

The blaze in Calimesa “is burning a lot of structures,” said Scott McLean, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. He said there were “numerous medical emergencies” inside the mobile home park.

“It’s multiple little fires everywhere, because the winds are throwing embers,” McLean said.

In Northern California, both households and businesses were hoping the power shut-off would end before they were forced to throw away food.

A stone’s throw from the shores of the Monterey Bay, uncertainty about when power might return fueled frustration and anxiety at businesses on the Central Coast.

At the New Leaf Community Market in the coastal town of Aptos, large refrigerated trucks were brought in to offload and temporarily store perishables.

At the Seascape resort, the owner of Hong Kong Garden restaurant said he regretted placing an order Wednesday night for fresh shrimp, scallops and lettuce from local suppliers, only to worry that he would have throw everything away Friday.

After a generator blew early Thursday at El Patio Grocery in La Selva Beach, the store’s manager, David Castillo said he was concerned that items like milk and deli meats might go bad. He juggled which products to keep cold.

“We haven’t had ice in two days,” said Castillo, whose power at his home across the street was still on.

While it is too early to calculate the total economic cost of the shutdown, Michael Wara, a climate and energy expert at Stanford University, has come up with some estimates.

Wara, who lost power at his home in Mill Valley at 2 a.m. Wednesday and has no hot water, internet connection or cellular service, estimated that the disruption could cost the state anywhere from $65 million to $2.5 billion.

Whatever the outcome, the outage will probably make only a small dent in California’s multitrillion-dollar economy.

“It’s a manageable loss,” Wara said. “It’s definitely a lot smaller than the losses that have been caused by wildfires in Northern California over the last couple of years.”

But even beyond the economic cost there was the nuisance of canceled meetings, spotty cellular service and intersections without traffic lights.

At the University of California, Berkeley, much of which was running on emergency power Thursday, researchers worried about keeping laboratory animals alive and well.

Faculty, students and nonessential staff generally were asked to stay home, but some staff members were tasked with looking after lab specimens and chemicals, said Randy Howard Katz, the vice chancellor for research.

“Beyond life safety being our highest priority, the campus’s highest research priority is to protect our research animals,” Katz said.

Katz called the power shutdown “enormously disruptive.”

Many in the region braced for the days ahead.

At Moraga Royale, an assisted-living facility in Moraga, a town in the San Francisco Bay Area, the motion sensor doors didn’t work, the lights were dim and televisions were inoperable because of the power cut. A generator provided minimal electricity but not enough to keep all of the facility’s food cold. But Dianne Wilson, the director, said residents were adapting.

“They are handling it better than the young people with all their cellphones,” she said.

MORAGA, Calif. — When Ben Faus went to bed at his home in the foothills above the Monterey Bay, he knew there was a chance his power would go out but he didn’t know exactly when. About 3 a.m. on Thursday he was jolted awake because his sleep apnea breathing machine stopped working.

Large areas of Northern California remained without power Thursday as a major outage rocked the region for a second day. About 600,000 electricity customers were affected Thursday morning after the state’s largest utility carried out the second phase of its intentional power cut.

Pacific Gas and Electric said extreme winds overnight forced the additional shutdown, which the utility organized to prevent equipment from sparking fires.

The second phase affected bedroom communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and added to the hundreds of thousands of customers who had lost power on Wednesday. As of Thursday morning, the company had restored power to 137,000 customers.

But other customers may be without electricity for several more days, said Melissa Subbotin, a spokeswoman for the company. High winds in some areas were not forecast to subside until Friday, she said.

A fire after midnight Thursday in the town of Moraga, home to St. Mary’s College, prompted evacuations and burned around 50 acres but was brought under control before dawn.

Pacific Gas and Electric says it will deploy a fleet of helicopters and more than 6,000 technicians to inspect the lines before they are brought back on, a process that could take up to five days.

‘This isn’t the end of this.’

When Ben Faus went to sleep Wednesday night at his home in the foothills above the Monterey Bay, he knew there was a chance his power would go out. About 3 a.m., when he was jolted awake because his electric sleep apnea breathing machine stopped working, he knew the blackout had arrived. “All of a sudden, I was like, ‘I can’t breathe,’” he said.

Faus, 74, is a retired pharmacist who has lived with his wife in the Central Coast town of Aptos for three decades. On a cold and clear Thursday morning, they were among tens of thousands of residents in Santa Cruz County, as well as large metro areas in San Jose and Oakland, who woke up to a blackout as part of PG&amp;E;’s fire-precaution plan.

In a region where officials this week issued a red-flag fire warning for the Santa Cruz Mountains, Faus said he appreciated the effort to prevent sparks but the utility was not doing enough to keep residents informed of when and how long power would be turned off. “I can see the reason they’re gun-shy, but I think they’re overdoing it,” Faus said. “I almost feel like they’re trying to show people just how vital they are.”

Outside a Safeway grocery store just after dawn Thursday, dead traffic lights caused backups. Commuters toting travel mugs from homes without power begrudgingly got back into their cars without coffee when security guards informed them the store would open late.

While many residents said they had received emails or calls warning them that PG&amp;E; may cut power this week, most said they had trouble getting access to online maps and were unaware after a day of delays on Wednesday if the shut-off would actually happen.

Beth O’Shaughnessy and her family of four lost power at their Larkin Valley home with 13 horses, dogs and other pets around 11 p.m. Wednesday night. Though the family has a generator for winter storms in the mountains, they had held off on stocking up food because of the uncertain timeline and long lines for fuel. “We weren’t sure if we would be able to get gas, so we didn’t want to get too much stuff,” she said. “One thing at a time, one meal. I’m kind of keeping that in the back of my head.”

Gayle Clark, a 69-year-old Air Force veteran, watched the commotion outside the grocery store with interest as he walked his brown Doberman. Clark, an electrical contractor who said he has worked for utilities elsewhere in the state, has for the past five months lived in a trailer with a generator after he was unable to find a landlord willing to accept a subsidized housing voucher. For as long as California’s fire problem endures, he expects similar scenes in the future. “This isn’t the end of this,” Clark said. “This is the beginning.”

The economic losses are only starting to be tallied.

Michael Wara lost power at his home in Mill Valley at 2 a.m. Wednesday. He has no hot water, internet connection or cellular service.

“We’re camping in a very nice tent called our house,” he said.

But shortly before his lights went off, Wara, a climate and energy expert at Stanford University, got to work calculating the potential impact of the outage on the California economy. Using a statistical model developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Wara estimated that the disruption could cost the state as much as $2.5 billion. Or as little as $65 million.

The long-term economic damage will depend on a range of factors, experts say, from the blackout’s duration to the number of major businesses affected. Whatever the outcome, the outage will probably make only a small dent in California’s multitrillion-dollar economy.

For now, however, that may be little comfort to hotels that have had to cancel reservations or restaurants where refrigeration has stopped.

“Restaurants aren’t running and businesses aren’t running, so obviously commerce isn’t happening,” said Christopher Thornberg, a founding partner at the research and consulting firm Beacon Economics. “There’s going to be some loss in terms of food spoilage.”

But for many companies, Thornberg said, “it’s not business canceled, just business delayed.”

And for some, the blackout even represents a business opportunity.

CD &amp; Power, a company that sells generators in Northern California, has seen an uptick in sales and rentals, said Lisa Carter, the general manager.

Usually, she said, the company sells a few Honda generators a month. In the last two days, it has sold 13 and has exhausted its rental inventory. “We are buried this morning dispatching equipment,” Carter said.

“As many people as we’re helping, we’re having to tell many no, because there’s physically no equipment,” she said.

— David Yaffe-Bellany

UC Berkeley canceled classes and focused on protecting research and lab animals.

Classes were canceled on Thursday at the University of California, Berkeley, which was running on emergency power. But some staff members scrambled to preserve critical research work from harm as they worried about keeping laboratory animals safe.

Although faculty members, students and nonessential staff generally were asked to stay home, some researchers were asked to report to work in case any animals needed to be relocated.

Officials said major research equipment had been shut down, including research computing and sensitive instrumentation. Some refrigeration units containing samples had been moved to the University of California, San Francisco. A satellite launch scheduled for Thursday evening was scheduled to go forward as planned under generator power.

“The campus’ highest research priority is to protect our research animals, then our experimental specimens, and finally our reagents,” Randy Howard Katz, vice chancellor for research, said in a statement.

Katz called the power shutdown “enormously disruptive” to the university’s research activities, and said the university was calculating the cost in lost research time and lost or damaged experimental materials.

PG&amp;E; shut down power to the campus after midnight Thursday, when it began running on battery backup, generators and, in some cases, Berkeley’s small co-generation power facility.

Classes were first canceled Wednesday in anticipation of the power outage, and students were told to charge their cellphones and other electronic devices. Residence halls were open, but many of them were without power, said a university spokeswoman.

As the weather improved on Thursday, senior campus leaders began considering restoring normal operations on Friday. But by the afternoon, no decision had been announced.

— Anemona Hartocollis

Many in Northern California had harsh words for PG&amp;E.;

Citing a weather forecast ideal for wildfires and staring down billions in potential liabilities from past blazes, PG&amp;E; decided sparks from its electrical equipment or a downed power line would pose a greater risk than grumbling customers.

But some residents and state officials felt the utility had overstepped.

State Sen. Bill Dodd, a Democrat who represents northern counties of the Bay Area, said the situation was “beyond frustrating” in a statement on his website. “Public safety power shut-offs have a role to play when they’re needed to prevent massive wildfires,” he said. “However, many of my constituents are disturbed that the power was shut down before the winds started to pick up in the North Bay.”

“Sadly, poor performance by PG&amp;E; is par for the course, so it’s not surprising,” he added.

One police department poked fun at the utility’s less-than-ideal rollout, which included problems with its website and early maps that left some residents confused about whether they would be affected. The department, in Pleasanton, California, posted a fake outage map on Facebook, with the entire state scribbled out in red.

“Remain calm,” the post read. “Use your cellphone light to search frantically for the one flashlight you think you have in the house. It will be dead of course. Search for batteries.”

Others did not appear to share their sense of humor. California Highway Patrol said that it was investigating a report that a PG&amp;E; vehicle had been shot at in Colusa County, north of Sacramento.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that residents in the blackout areas had a right to be “outraged.”

But he stopped short of criticizing PG&amp;E.; “This is industry best practice,” he said of the decision to cut electricity. “This is just at a scale that we haven’t seen.”

The governor, who was speaking with reporters, said the state needed to do everything it could to avoid a recurrence of last year’s Camp Fire, which killed 86 people.

There are still weeks left in fire season, he said. “Remember, we are in the peak of it.”

PG&E Power Outage: Californians Face a Blackout

The second phase of the shutdown cut power to about 250,000 more customers.

Pacific Gas &amp; Electric said extreme winds overnight forced the shutdown, which the utility organized to prevent equipment from sparking fires.

The second phase affected bedroom communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and added to the 500,000 customers who had already lost power earlier Wednesday.

A fire after midnight in the town of Moraga, home to St. Mary’s College, prompted evacuations and burned around 50 acres but was brought under control before dawn.

Pacific Gas &amp; Electric expects the weather to subside in most of its operation areas by noon Thursday and will deploy a fleet of helicopters and more than 6,000 technicians to inspect the lines before they are brought back on.

State Sen. Bill Dodd, a Democrat who represents northern counties of the Bay Area, said the situation was “beyond frustrating” in a statement on his website.

“Public safety power shut-offs have a role to play when they’re needed to prevent massive wildfires,” he said. “However, many of my constituents are disturbed that the power was shut down before the winds started to pick up in the North Bay.”

One police department poked fun at the utility’s less-than-ideal rollout, which included problems with its website and early maps that left some residents confused about whether they would be affected. The department, in Pleasanton, posted a fake outage map on Facebook, with the entire state scribbled out in red.

Quick, charge the Tesla.

Before the power went out Wednesday, lines grew at gas stations across the Bay Area. And this being California, a queue had also formed at a row of Tesla superchargers in downtown Los Gatos.

“It’s the new world,” said Mira Wooten, who was charging her white, two-week-old Model 3. “Instead of lines for gas, there are lines for power.”

Gregory Hansen, who charged his blue Tesla sedan at the same station, was in Silicon Valley on business. The night before, he had charged his car at his home in the El Dorado Hills, east of Sacramento, right before the power went out.

You might grow up used to modern conveniences, Hansen said, “then all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Well, holy crap, I guess maybe we need a generator, or maybe we should start buying more freeze-dried food.’”

The power cuts hit the agricultural economy.

The harvest season is in full swing in the Sacramento Valley, but the power outage has idled some processing operations.

Mariani Nut Co., a family business that runs many of the nut processing facilities around the city of Winters, said that 75% of its processing capacity had been taken out by the shutdown. Matt Mariani, a partner in the business who manages retail sales and marketing, said about 100 employees were not working Wednesday because of the outage.

Mariani said the timing of the outages was disappointing, with the holiday season approaching and many large nut orders already in. Many farmers have concerns about spoilage.

“If they don’t get their products in and dried on time they could see some risks,” Mariani said.

Nearby, Elia Arce, the owner of El Pueblo Meat Market and Taqueria, said she was forced to reduce her workforce to three from 12 because of the blackouts.

She feared that meats, cheeses and other food items would spoil.

“If this continues, we have to throw everything away,” Arce said.

SAN FRANCISCO — About 800,000 electricity customers in Northern California were without power Thursday after the state’s largest utility carried out the second phase of its intentional power cut.

PG&E Power Outage Expands in California

Hundreds of thousands of households lost power when California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, shut down a vast web of electrical lines as a precaution against wildfires. Not knowing how long the outage would last, residents hurried to gas stations and supermarkets, stocking up on essentials as if a hurricane were bearing down.

It was an extraordinary moment for California. In the state that brought the world the iPhone and the internet as most people know it, residents fumbled for flashlights, hauled jerrycans of gasoline and read instructions on how to manually open their automatic garage doors. In the fifth-largest economy in the world, hundreds of thousands of people were forced off the grid.

The vast scope of the power shutdown suggested a new layer of vulnerability for California. A state prone to earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides and wildfires now was faced with a power company’s decision to shut off the electricity, with relatively little notice.

By Wednesday afternoon, at least 500,000 customers — each customer can represent numerous family members or apartment dwellers — were without power. The company said electricity would be shut off for 250,000 additional customers Wednesday evening.

Meteorologists said the strong winds that were forecast in the hills and canyons Wednesday resembled those that propelled deadly fires in the wine country of Napa and Sonoma counties two years ago. The power company, which declared bankruptcy in January in the face of tens of billions of dollars in liabilities from past fires, said it was not taking chances this time.

The shutdown led to the cancellation of classes at Humboldt State University, Mills College in Oakland and the University of California, Berkeley. It also contributed to multiple crashes at intersections where traffic lights went dark. Banks and businesses in some Northern California towns shut down; agricultural processing machines were inoperable in the thick of the fall harvest.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the largest concentrations of wealth and cutting-edge technology in the world, the shut-off felt like an anachronism, something that might happen in a less-developed country. Long lines formed at gas stations a dozen or so miles from the headquarters of Apple and Google.

“What’s next?” said Robert Cruz, an electrical foreman whose crews have installed fiber optic cables at Facebook. He was at a gas station in San Jose, the country’s 10th-largest city, filling up a 5-gallon container with gasoline for a generator he was on his way to buy from a friend. He and his wife, an executive assistant at Intel, spent Tuesday calling nearby stores for new generators, but the closest store that had one was 1 1/2 hours away in California’s Central Valley.

“We’re doing what we can to keep our refrigerator and our freezer going,” he said.

For many, the power shutdown was a reminder of how helpless they were without electricity. While wealthier residents were able to fall back on solar panels and battery systems for electricity, living off the grid was not an option for Sharmaine Lindahl.

The power outage had cascading consequences for Lindahl and her husband, who live in Arcata, nearly 300 miles north of San Francisco. On Tuesday night, she received a text message from PG&amp;E; warning her of the impending power shut-off. Five hours later the lights went out and all of the electrical appliances in her kitchen, the only way she can cook, were useless.

Most businesses were closed in Arcata on Wednesday, she said, and gasoline was scarce.

Wednesday was also her husband’s payday, but the bank was closed and his company paid him in cash because it could not print out checks.

“Our bank account is going to be overdrawn,” Lindahl said. “We live paycheck to paycheck. So this is going to hit us very hard.”

The Lindahls felt like their city was collateral damage: The fire risk is low in Arcata, a city along the coast whose weather this time of year is most often fog and rain.

As the outages spread Wednesday, so did anger and frustration at PG&amp;E;, a company that has a history of negligence and safety violations, including a gas pipeline explosion south of San Francisco in 2010 that killed eight people and has it under criminal probation. The company’s equipment was also deemed responsible for California’s deadliest fire, the inferno that razed the city of Paradise last year, killing 86 people.

When the forecast winds failed to materialize in some areas Wednesday, criticism mounted against PG&amp;E.; Was it necessary to turn so many lives upside down? Was this a ploy by the company to prove how much California needs it?

Jim Nielsen, a state senator who represents the area around Paradise, called the shut-off “unacceptable.”

“This policy has to change,” he said in a statement. “PG&amp;E;’s decision to protect itself from liability at the expense of hardworking Californians will not be tolerated.

“Millions without electricity is what a third-world country looks like, not a state that is the fifth-largest economy in the world,” he said.

PG&amp;E; has for months warned that preemptive power blackouts would be likely as it tries to catch up on a yearslong backlog of maintenance work on the power grid.

The issue has been a frequent point of discussion in PG&amp;E;’s criminal probation proceedings. Fire victim advocates and Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco have repeatedly questioned why PG&amp;E; had not turned off the power as often as other utilities, such as San Diego Gas &amp; Electric, in high-risk weather conditions.

PG&amp;E; said the sole reason for power shut-offs was safety.

“We are going to protect human life first,” William Johnson, its chief executive, said in an interview over the summer about the company’s grid strategy.

Bill Biasi, the mayor of Winters, a city surrounded by orchards and tomato fields in the Sacramento Valley, said the power shut-off would be a setback for nut-processing businesses that need power for their equipment. But he said he sympathized with the company’s dilemma — how to provide power in a part of the state so prone to wildfires.

“PG&amp;E; is in a tough situation,” Biasi said. “I think they’re doing what they can to make sure that what happened last year doesn’t happen again. But is it frustrating? It’s frustrating to everyone.”

The changing climate has brought hotter summers that dry out vegetation and make it more vulnerable to fire. Of the 10 largest wildfires recorded in California, five have been in the last decade. PG&amp;E; is required by law to serve homes nestled in wildland areas and is liable if its equipment starts a fire, whether or not it was found to be negligent.

PG&amp;E; has not offered a concrete timetable on when the power will be restored. Every inch of every line needs to be inspected before lines can be reenergized, the company has said, and that process could take up to five days.

The prospect of being without power for so long has been especially difficult for the most vulnerable.

In Oakland, Stacey Milbern spent more than two hours Tuesday afternoon calling PG&amp;E; to find out whether power would be cut off to her home. Milbern uses a ventilator for breathing and needs other medical devices.

On Wednesday afternoon she still had electricity.

“I’m hoping that means my house won’t be affected, but it’s on the outage maps,” she said. “For the everyday disabled person, it’s so scary.”

Lights Out Across Northern California as PG&E Warns of Wildfire Threat

SAN FRANCISCO — The lights went off in stages in Northern California on Wednesday, from the forests near the Oregon border, down the spine of the Sierra Nevada and finally through the dense hillside communities across the Bay from San Francisco.

The state’s largest power utility, Pacific Gas &amp; Electric, said it had cut power to 500,000 customers soon after midnight. A second round of cuts affecting 250,000 more customers in the hills surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area had been scheduled for noon but was delayed.

“It’s all dependent on weather conditions,” said Jeff Smith, a spokesman for the company. Smith could not give a new time for the next round of blackouts, though a police department in the East Bay of San Francisco said the new power shut-off time was 8 p.m.

While PG&amp;E; said that hundreds of thousands of customers would lose power, an entire apartment building can be considered a single customer. Once the two phases are complete, around 2.5 million people will be without electricity, according to one estimate.

The power company described Wednesday’s cuts as a precaution, hoping to prevent its electrical equipment and power lines from sparking blazes in dangerous conditions.

These are not your average California winds.

Meteorologists compared the winds forecast for Wednesday to those that propelled fires through wine country two years ago.

Hannah Chandler-Cooley, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Sacramento office, said a strong weather system moving through the Great Basin was causing the high winds across Northern California.

“Northerly winds first and foremost really dry out the area,” she said, a risky combination with grasses and vegetation in the summer and fall, when there has not been much rain.

Chandler-Cooley said the region rarely gets north winds, which blow for only a few days just a few times a year, and can cause trees to topple or limbs to fall — often on power lines. Adding to her concern are forecasts of “pretty extreme winds,” with sustained speeds of 20-30 mph and gusts at 35-45 mph or higher in some areas, like mountain canyons.

While the power outage may help prevent sparks, she urged residents to practice fire safety, recalling that several wildfires last year were caused not by downed power lines but by human activity. The Carr fire spread after sparks from the wheel rim of a car fell on dry grass.

The utility is trying to avoid a repeat of the deadly fires that have ravaged the state.

The company has been found responsible for dozens of wildfires in recent years, including the state’s deadliest, an inferno in and around the town of Paradise last November that killed 86 people.

Over the summer the utility turned off power to less-populated areas in Northern California, but this shut-off is by far the company’s most extensive, affecting large parts of the San Francisco Bay Area.

More than half of all counties in California — 34 out of 58 — are expected to be affected by the power cut, according to PG&amp;E;, one of the country’s largest utilities.

The outages have upended daily life for many in the Bay Area.

Officials in Santa Rosa, about 50 miles north of San Francisco, said they had responded to multiple traffic collisions, including five with injuries, at intersections without power.

“Please slow down and treat all intersections without power as a four-way stop,” city officials said on Twitter.

For residents in assisted-care homes or dependent on medical equipment in their own homes, the power cutoffs added to their daily challenges and stoked the worries of family members.

“My father is in a nursing home in Santa Rosa working on backup power,” Daisy Pistey-Lyhne of Santa Rosa said. A sister with a disability, who lives in a nearby apartment complex, still had power Wednesday, but Pistey-Lyhne was busy trying to make contingency plans.

In Oakland, Stacey Milbern, who uses a ventilator for breathing and needs other medical devices, spent more than two hours Tuesday afternoon calling PG&amp;E; to try to find out whether her home would lose power and whether she would get additional assistance.

She learned that her home did fall in an area affected by the outage. But she still had her power Wednesday afternoon. “Honestly, I have so much privilege. I work full-time from home,” she said. “But for the everyday disabled person, it’s so scary.”

As of late Wednesday afternoon, PG&amp;E; spokesman Jeff Smith could not confirm whether any Bay Area hospitals would lose power during the second phase of planned shut-offs, which are expected to take place Wednesday evening.

“There may be some hospitals that are in the footprint, but we won’t know for sure,” Smith said. “We’re working extensively with locations like hospitals to ensure that they have an emergency plan.”

Turning the power back on could take as long as five days.

PG&amp;E; anticipates that it will begin turning power back on starting Thursday, when winds subside.

But reenergizing power lines is a tricky process, even after the winds subside. Sumeet Singh, a PG&amp;E; vice president, said in a briefing Tuesday night that technicians will need to inspect “every inch” of line before restoring power. That could take as long as five days, he said.

PG&amp;E;’s website was down for many people, right when they needed it.

On Wednesday morning, PG&amp;E; customers across Northern California said they were frustrated by difficulties getting information about blackouts and when power might be restored. Many blamed the utility for cutting power before they believed it was really necessary.

“There hasn’t been even the slightest bit of wind in the entire county,” Candace Bennyi, whose power was cut in Sonoma County, wrote in an email.

“One would have expected PG&amp;E; to at least wait to see if there was actually going to be an event that warranted such a move.”

The utility’s website was working only intermittently — something Bennyi mentioned too.

In Santa Rosa, Pistey-Lyhne woke up without power in her home, which she said was at the edge of where the power cutoff had been planned in her neighborhood.

Though Pistey-Lyhne made preparations for the blackout, she expressed concern that many others in the region were left unaware. She said that she had found out only Tuesday afternoon that the power would be shut off overnight.

“I don’t think PG&amp;E; did a great job,” she said, despite the local government’s work on improving emergency preparedness and communications. “It was less than 12 hours’ notice.”

Residents have been stocking up on generators and water.

Shoppers emptied supermarket shelves of batteries, water and other essentials, with many hitting the stores Tuesday night and early Wednesday while power was still on.

In the small beach town of Montara, just down Route 1 from San Francisco, Heidi Kay and her partner, Steve Christie, took an inventory Wednesday of their few supplies, which amounted to little more than granola bars, oatmeal and fruit, said Christie, 49. “We haven’t really stocked up on anything,” he said.

Kay, 39, had driven to the nearby town of San Bruno to buy a few groceries after finding the Target near her office had been practically stripped bare.

The hardware store was also “out of everything,” she said, so Montara residents were taking matters into their own hands on the neighborhood social app Nextdoor.

“Everyone on there is in search of a generator,” she said. “It’s mad chaos.”

Over the summer, stores in Northern California reported higher-than-usual sales of gasoline generators. For those who missed out, PG&amp;E; established around 30 facilities stocked with bottled water and outlets to charge electronic devices.

Lines at gas stations were 20 cars deep Tuesday night, reported Gary Bowman of Grass Valley in the Sierra Foothills area midway between Sacramento and Reno, Nevada. But Wednesday morning, as he and his wife searched for a restaurant to have breakfast in, he found the area “deader as a doornail.”

Bowman, a recently retired schools superintendent who also spent 10 years as a wildland firefighter, said he would spend the day working on his 2-acre property, where he tames the undergrowth to help keep fires at bay.

SAN FRANCISCO — A deliberate power outage that spanned large parts of Northern California on Wednesday sent hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for gasoline and other essentials as strong, gusty winds and months of dry weather put the state on alert for wildfires.

Thomas Fuller

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