After a punishing storm, PG&E overcomes widespread damage to restore power.

Wearing a PG&E hard hat and standing in front of the company’s Monterey County base camp – a collection of white trailers and tents within view of WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca – Teresa Alvarado, PG&E vice president for the South Bay and Central Coast region, spelled out the impact of the Sunday, Feb. 4 storm. “It has proved to be among the most damaging storms that we’ve ever experienced,” she said at a press conference Monday, Feb. 5.

“In terms of outage totals, this was one of the top three most damaging single-day storms on record,” she said, comparable to storms in 1995 and 2008. With wind gusts of over 90mph in some locations within PG&E’s service area and the state’s first-ever warning for hurricane-force winds, even healthy trees toppled, pulling down power lines with them. “We have a lot of work ahead of us and we’re taking an all-hands-on-deck approach until the job is done,” Alvarado said.

By late Sunday, over 31,000 PG&E customers were without power across Monterey County, mostly concentrated in Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach, Carmel, Carmel Valley and surrounding areas. Incident Commander Joe Holbert said he had 37 crews representing about 400 workers tackling the outages, about 105 in the county. “Sensitive customers” like Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula and schools were prioritized, but crews had to wait until winds subsided and fallen trees and debris were removed to be considered safe in order to begin repair work.

On Monday afternoon, Feb. 5, the number without power was at 23,500, and that decreased by nearly half as of Tuesday morning. Pebble Beach and parts of Pacific Grove remained the most heavily impacted Tuesday, with an estimated restoration time of 10pm Thursday, Feb. 8. That may have been a conservative estimate: Some neighborhoods advised to expect power would be restored by late Wednesday saw power back two days earlier.

The Laguna Seca base camp and level of communications were in sharp contrast to March 2023, after one of the final in a series of punishing storms hit the region. A main power line felled by a healthy cypress tree in Monterey caused around 37,000 customers in the southern Peninsula to lose power. A base camp was located in Santa Cruz County, and getting information from PG&E was a challenge. Restoration times promised early in that outage proved impossible for PG&E to meet, leaving residents frustrated.