Nearly 800,000
California homes and businesses can expect to lose electricity for up to several days from Wednesday, in a planned PG&E power shutdown of unprecedented scale due to heightened wildfire risks from high winds, the utility said.
Pacific Gas & Electric Co, a unit of PG&E Corp, said on Tuesday it was extending a previously announced "public safety power shutoff" to 34 counties in northern and central California, marking the largest such precautionary outage the utility has undertaken to date.
Power will be turned off to communities in stages, starting in northern California, just after 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, depending on the timing of high-wind conditions locally, PG&E said in a statement.