Quick Take
After a blustery Tuesday afternoon that knocked out power to more than 3,000 Pacific Gas & Electric customers in Santa Cruz, more than 1,800 were in the dark as of 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, mainly in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
UPDATE, 5:30 a.m. Wednesday: Some 1,857 Santa Cruz County households were without power as of early Wednesday, per the PowerOutage.us tracking site.
A Pacific Gas & Electric outage map showed outages spread through the Santa Cruz Mountains, particularly between Scotts Valley and Boulder Creek.
There was no immediate estimated time for power to be restored.
TUESDAY, 6:30 p.m.: Some 3,000 Pacific Gas & Electric customers in Santa Cruz experienced power outages early Tuesday afternoon as strong wind gusts and rain hit the region.
By 3 p.m., power had been restored to 3,056 PG&E customers; 14 were still without power, said Stephanie Magallon. The cause of the outage was most probably storm-related, she said, adding that it’s possible that branches or trees fell on power lines. PG&E crews were still investigating the cause, Magallon said.
“I think one of the biggest hazards right now are the trees,” she said. “I know we’ve seen rain that has really saturated the soil, so the trees are a bigger hazard than usual because of that. The winds don’t have to be necessarily as strong to take [trees] down.”
Magallon expected more outages in the Santa Cruz Mountains – where wind gusts of 60 to 70 mph were forecast for the area, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Garcia, who said coastal areas could see gusts up to 60 mph.
Along with strong winds, heavy rain was expected to continue through the night, which would increase the likelihood of localized flooding across the region, said Garcia. He didn’t anticipate areas such as Soquel or Aptos to experience flooding but said the intense rain could overwhelm storm drains for a short period of time.
The county will get a brief break from the rain on Wednesday, Garcia said, before picking up again on Thursday, though winds and rain are not likely to be as intense. The National Weather Service had earlier issued a flood watch Monday through Wednesday at 4 a.m.
PG&E has an outage prediction model that takes data from past storms and uses it to calculate which communities could be affected by current storms. “It tells us the time that they’re going to see the brunt of the storm, and it tells us how many crews we should have ready to go in that area, so that we’re able to respond quickly,” Magallon said.
The company also set up several staging areas near Santa Cruz Mountains communities, she said, that were the likeliest to be impacted by the weather system.
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