More than 10,000 California customers were experiencing power outages following fires near Lake Tahoe early Monday.
Placer County appeared to be the worst affected, with at least 10,000 outages recorded by PowerOutage.us, a site that collects, records, and aggregates live power outage data from utilities across the country.
Over 1,800 outages were reported in Plumas County, and 1,364 in Nevada County, as of 02:14 a.m. local time.
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Both Sierra and Trinity counties had around 800 outages each, according to the tracker.
A total of over 28,000 customers were affected by outages across the state at the time this article was written. In Contra Costa County 5,747 were recorded, and a further 3,621 were recorded in Santa Clara.
“We are aware of the power outage affecting the entire north side of our service territory. NV Energy has cut power to the transmission line servicing this area due to a fire in Verdi. There is no restoration time currently available. We will update when information is available,” one supplier – Liberty Utilities – said in an online post.
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Newsweek has reached out to Liberty Utilities for comment via an online contact form outside of standard working hours.
Publicly owned electric and water utility Truckee Donner PUD previously announced a “system-wide power outage,” stating that NV energy had de-energized transmission lines that feed the company’s networks due to their proximity to an active wildfire in Verdi. The firm later said that power had been restored “to all TDPUD customers.”
According to local outlet South Tahoe Now, two fires were burning north of Lake Tahoe on Sunday – one in Truckee and one in Verdi.
The outlet reports that one of the fires had reached 400 acres in size as of an 11:00 p.m. update and was started by a vehicle fire. The update stated that the second fire was 38 percent contained.
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Monday morning’s outages come as California has been ravaged by fires which have burned hundreds of thousands of acres across the Golden State this year.
“As of July 30, 2024, wildfires have scorched a staggering 751,327 acres across our state,” the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said in an online statement.
The department said that this year’s wildfire activity is 2,816 percent higher than last year, with 29 times the amount of acreage burned.
Newsweek reported in early August that over 300,000 customers were affected by power outages following strong thunderstorms across the Midwest.
More than 200,000 of these outages were in Nebraska, with around 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” 80 mph winds.
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