I am getting tons of emails about the power failure, so I am putting what I know here, for everyone. If some of this is not perfectly accurate, I apologize in advance to PG&E. However, their automated system left MUCH to be desired in terms of timely information, and their web site NEVER showed the Bucks Lake outage. Enough said there…..
The power went out at 4:30 am on Sunday. Immediately there were numerous phone calls to the PG&E automated system, which announced power should be restored by noon that day. As we all know, that came and went. Late in the afternoon, one crewman used the phone at Haskins store and told Debbie and Ken that the problem was in the 6 mile buried section that runs along the Grizzly Forebay road, and he was ordering up a considerable amount of equipment to effect repairs. His estimate was something like between 6 and 8 pm that night.
When the power did not come back on all night, PG&E local people were contacted the next morning, and they expressed some surprise that the power was not on. They thought it was. They had repaired two of the three cables. (That is a 23,000 volt primary, using three heavy cables).
They returned to Grizzly Forebay road, and located the third break. At that point they discovered the required parts were not available locally, so they had to be obtained from Chico.
Finally, the power was restored at 10:30 pm on Monday night.
Thank goodness this did not happen in the winter, as the repairs required heavy equipment that could not be gotten to the site over deep snow. If it was winter, we might still be without….
So, now we can all talk about where we were during the BIG LABOR DAY POWER FAILURE. That will be an old salts legend for years to come.