Public Safety Emergency Power Outage

I would love to be a fly on the wall watching a bunch of people sitting around a table in Pacific Gas and Electric's boardroom trying to decide what to call this plan to cut power to their customers so that their equipment, neglected and under maintained for years, doesn't spark and cause fires. There is a certain irony in that scenario that is hard to escape.I don't think anybody would argue with the fact that this is probably necessary to prevent conflagrations like the one that started here exactly two years ago to the day. I think a LOT of people think that such medieval solutions wouldn't be necessary if PG&E had done proper required maintenance on their power lines. I think a LOT MORE people will question the sanity of the plan after they actually do it starting at midnight tonight

The messages we have been getting from PG&E for a couple of days have been so opaque and vague that I don't think anybody took them very seriously. Even if we had they wouldn't have told us much. Today, however, while we were in class learning about Siri and Alexa and whether we can trust them, everybody's phones started lighting up with messages.  This situation is filled with ironies that I will continue to contemplate and write about later....

Of course, just like two years ago, there was practically no gas in our car. Worse yet, also like two years ago, every gas station in town was a total madhouse.  We did finally get to one where an employee was out directing traffic...a harrowing experience for him since gas stations are never very orderly, even when people aren't queuing for places and blocking streets.

We finally made it home with our full tank of gas, having forgotten that we were having the driveway resurfaced today. Yet another irony met us in the form of caution tape at the bottom of our driveway. It took a moment for the brain cells to start firing correctly and for us to realize that it was just the driveway guy's reminder that he had resurfaced the driveway. We weren't going to put the car in the garage tonight anyway since it is a hassle to open the automatic door when there is no power. 

We're now watering all the plants filling the bathtub with water (after a frantic search for the plug which we haven't used or even seen in five years) and figuring how much food  is in the freezer, and how much of it we can consume for dinner.

I keep reminding myself that despite PG&E's vague wording, it really isn't an emergency....yet.