California Fires Loom Again. So Do Power Outages

Believe it or not, firefighters were able to save all of these homes
in Pacific Palisades, California during  a brush fire Monday.
Image from ABC 7

It's the peak of the California fire season, and they're not getting a break. Not this week.

Intense Santa Ana winds are forecast to whip up today and especially tomorrow and Friday,  causing a big risk of explosive brush fires that can rip through neighborhoods in an instant.

There was already one close call Monday, when a fire in Pacific Palisades burned just feet from multi-million dollar hilltop mansions. Three homes burned in another fire in San Bernadino, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Pacific Gas & Electric once again plans to cut power to prevent falling power lines for arcing and causing fires. This of course is controversial.  On the one hand, it's preventing fires. On the other hand spending a couple days at least without power and inconvenient and very expensive for businesses.  

Earlier this month, PG&E cut power to 800,000 homes and businesses in an effort to prevent fires. This time, they're anticipating 200,000 power cuts, but that figure could change.  This is turning into an ugly new normal out there in California, isn't it?

During the last set of outages, there were still damaging wildfires, so it's hard to tell if the power outages helped or not.  One of the worst fires was caused by a garbage truck driver dumping burning trash on dry terrain, causing a fire that destroyed dozens of buildings.

Plus, as NPR points out, the last PG&E outage was not handled well. Their website crashed, call centers were overloaded and outage maps were not accurate.  We'll have to see how things go this week.

And no more burning garbage trucks, please.

Here's a video of the fire in Pacific Palisades on Monday. You can see how close the houses came to burning down. Firefighters were able to beat back the flames at the last second in some cases: