After fires near Lake Tahoe, more than 10,000 homes in California experienced power outages early Monday.
Placer County appears to have been the worst affected, with at least 10,000 outages recorded by PowerOutage.us, a website that collects, records and aggregates power outage data from utilities across the country.
As of 2:14 a.m. local time, more than 1,800 outages had been reported in Plumas County and 1,364 in Nevada County.
According to the tracker, there were about 800 power outages in Sierra and Trinity counties each.
David Swanson/AFP via Getty Images
In total, more than 28,000 customers across the state were affected by power outages at the time of this writing, with 5,747 outages recorded in Contra Costa County and an additional 3,621 in Santa Clara.
“We are aware of the power outage affecting the entire north side of our service area. NV Energy has cut power to the transmission line serving this area due to a fire in Verdi. There is currently no known time for restoration. We will update as information becomes available,” a supplier – Liberty Utilities – said in an online post.
Newsweek reached out to Liberty Utilities outside of normal business hours for comment via an online contact form.
The Truckee Donner PUD, a public electric and water utility, had previously announced a “systemwide power outage,” saying that NV Energy had knocked out power to the transmission lines that feed the company’s grids due to their proximity to an active wildfire in Verdi. The company later said power had been restored “to all TDPUD customers.”
According to local news station South Tahoe Now, two fires raged north of Lake Tahoe on Sunday – one in Truckee and one in Verdi.
The news agency reported that one of the fires had reached 400 acres by 11 p.m. and was sparked by a vehicle fire. The update said the second fire was 38 percent contained.
Monday morning’s power outages came as California’s Golden State saw hundreds of thousands of acres of land devastated this year.
“As of July 30, 2024, wildfires have burned an incredible 751,327 acres across our state,” the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said in an online statement.
According to the agency, forest fire activity this year is 2,816 percent higher than last year, with 29 times as much area burned.
Newsweek In early August, it was reported that more than 300,000 customers were affected by power outages following severe thunderstorms in the Midwest.
More than 200,000 of these outages occurred in Nebraska, about 51,000 in Missouri and 50,000 in Kansas.
The Nebraska Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) issued an emergency alert at the time, warning of “destructive” winds of 80 miles per hour.
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