SACRAMENTO, Calif. _ Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday urged Pacific Gas & Electric to provide $100 rebates to residential customers affected by last week's unprecedented power shut-offs, asserting that the company's communications failures "put lives at risk."
"PG&E has an obligation to the customers affected by the company's inadequate preparation and failed execution of this power shut-off event," Newsom wrote in a letter sent to PG&E Chief Executive Bill Johnson. "Lives and commerce were interrupted. Too much hardship was caused."
Newsom's missive came two days after PG&E said it had restored electricity to the more than 700,000 customers in 35 counties throughout Northern and Central California who lost power; some were without electricity from early Wednesday until Saturday.
As a new tool to prevent wildfires, PG&E has been proactively shutting down power in anticipation of strong winds, hot temperatures and dry conditions that create an increased risk for its equipment to spark blazes. The sweeping outages forced schools and businesses to close and left elderly customers or those who use life-sustaining medical equipment scrambling to make backup plans.
Newsom and others criticized the outages as too broad and poorly executed. PG&E's website crashed multiple times during the outages, call centers experienced long wait times, and the company struggled to provide notifications to emergency personnel, Newsom said.
The governor instructed the California Public Utilities Commission to conduct a review of PG&E's planning and implementation of the shut-offs in order to help the state take steps to limit the use of such outages in the future. Newsom also called for PG&E to provide $250 rebates to small-business customers.
"It was clear from the start that PG&E implemented this extraordinary measure with astounding neglect and lack of preparation," Newsom said in a separate letter to CPUC President Marybel Batjer.
Newsom's announcement Monday marked the second time the governor had publicly lashed out at the utility since it drew the ire of customers in areas of the state that lost power.
