A California utility has announced it will shut off power to more than 800,000 customers in an effort to prevent new wildfires, in the largest preventive outage in state history. Separately, the Southern California Edison utility website said more than 106,000 of its customers in parts of eight counties could face power cuts. San Francisco is the only county in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area where power will not be affected. Some of California’s most destructive blazes in recent years were started by PG&E power lines. This year, the company agreed to pay billions of dollars to a group of insurance companies representing claimants from deadly northern California wildfires in 2017 and 2018.

Source: The Guardian October 08, 2019 22:27 UTC