Some Peninsula neighborhoods may not see power restored until Friday
community is becoming weary of ongoing power outages. PG&E is working to get the lights back on, but some neighborhoods may not see restoration until late Friday night. It's way too long. It would be nice if it came on sooner than Friday, but we'll see. That's all PG&E is promising at this point. The power went out during yesterday's storm and still hasn't come back for tens of thousands of people. Good evening.
I'm Julie Hainer and I'm Mike Meback at the height of the storm. 367,000 PG&E customers lost power tonight. Nearly 68,000 Bay Area customers remain in the dark. The utility says yesterday's storm knocked out power to more customers than any other storm since 1995. PG&E says the majority of affected customers in the South Bay with more than 43,000 18,000 are still without power on the peninsula. Live coverage now from PTVU's Genicotse Yama in Berlin game where people could spend another day without power. Janna.
Mike, they've actually closed down this part of El Camino Real because there's a cable that's stretching across the road still and you can see over there the houses street after street. It's darker. There are generators going on. This is the massive tree that fell. It actually hit this truck as well as another vehicle and right over here you can see one of the electric boxes that fell down. The other one is the one that fell down. The other one is the one that completely destroyed still here.
PG&E crews were out here, but they're still trying to get all of this pulled together because there's so much debris here. This is a problem throughout this neighborhood as well as up the peninsula and many people, as you said, could still be in the dark and the cold until Friday night. We know power since yesterday afternoon. This is a big problem. The residents of El Camino Real have been in power for a long time. Their power went out during Tuesday's windstorm. This has happened like every time it's like.
Like strong wind strong wind gusts brought down two massive eucalyptus trees across the street on El Camino Real trunks more than four feet in diameter demolished a truck and a car narrowly missing several houses and taking down an entire house. The house is now fully renovated and renovated with a roof and heat. I have an elderly father 94. We're in the dark with flashlights and candles. Many people with no way to cook made a run to the store. We just couldn't put anything in the oven or in the microwave because that uses too much power. And you know, we'd started a load of laundry and so that's all wet adults doing work and students doing homework crowded into the kitchen.
We've moved tables out. We brought out chairs from our community room. We've done everything we can to create more space. PG&E's website says power might not come back until Friday night. Exasperated customers wonder why PG&E doesn't have more crews or take steps to prevent repeated outages and better if we had the power lines being buried. It's extremely expensive to underground utilities measured in millions per mile. Burling a mayor, Michael Brownrig says the city decided to start a new project.
They have a new project that's been working on their own action. And so we've been working with Caltrans for five years to renovate the El Camino and in as part of that project, which we hope will begin construction next year will underground that entire utility line from. And that certainly would be a big help here at El Camino. Real you can see they have yellow tape right here on this cable that says they're going to be building a new project. And that's what PG&E says that they really try and prioritize the calls first going to biggest outages, then going to the ones where customers have lost power for the longest amount of time. But certainly there are a lot of people who are wishing that PG&E had the crews to be able to get to all of these much more quickly. They're hoping that it will be sooner than Friday.
But at this point, PG&E is saying.
Peninsula, PG&E, power outages, restoration