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High winds buffet Sonoma County as 23,000 PG&E customers left without power In anticipation of dangerous weather conditions starting Sunday night, PG&E cut power to more than 23,000 Sonoma County customers as part of a preemptive power shut-off to reduce the risk of its power lines igniting a wildfire during the strongest windstorm during this brutal fire season. By nightfall, winds in the North Bay whipped to over 80 mph at Mount St. Helena high in the Mayacamas Mountains, and humidity levels had dropped to single digits down in Santa Rosa, marking the most extreme fire weather conditions yet for an area that already has endured a historic fire season with Walbridge and Glass infernos, respectively, in August and September. With greater peak wind speeds expected to arrive close to midnight, Sonoma County braced Sunday for the type of “extreme” wind event not seen since the 2017 firestorm destroyed thousands of homes, and the 2019 Kincade fire scorched nearly 80,000 acres to be

Nearly half a million PG&E customers to lose power amid planned fire-safety shut-offs Sunday PG&E revealed Fridays that planned power shut-offs to take place Sunday would place nearly half a million homes and businesses or roughly 1.5 million people in the dark in 38 counties across Northern and Central California. Nearly a third of those potentially affected, or 143,726 customers, are in the Bay Area, where every county except San Francisco would see some outages under the utility’s plan. PG&E routinely shuts off distribution and transmission lines to prevent more wildfires from starting amid highly dangerous wind conditions. The fast, dry winds expected beginning Sunday night elevate the risk of damage to PG&E lines, from tree branches and other wind-whipped hazards. Earlier Friday, PG&E had upgraded the outage probability for the Bay Area and most other parts of its service territory from “elevated” to “watch” for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Some communities, inc