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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