Those Californians who haven’t already fled the state’s high taxes, are looking at man-made power outages for as much as 10 years, reports Katherine Blunt in the Wall Street Journal. She writes:
PG&E Corp. PCG -0.37% ’s chief executive said Friday that it could take as long as 10 years for the company to improve its electric system enough to significantly diminish the need to pull the plug on customers to reduce the risk of sparking fires.
Bill Johnson, who joined the company in May, made the disclosure at a California Public Utilities Commission hearing where the panel’s president, Marybel Batjer, sharply criticized the company’s “inadequate execution” of a shut-off in which it turned off power to large portions of Northern California for more than two days last week.
In Northern California where the risk of wildfires is greatest, residents were recently left with no power for days. They were forced to watch as their refrigerators defrosted, and suffered as medical equipment failed.
If California were a country, it would have the world’s fifth-largest economy. Yet, even with all that wealth, it can’t protect its citizens from third-world style blackouts.
You must prepare to fend for yourself. The two first steps you should take are buying a generator and storing water.
