This past weekend, just as the temperatures were cooling down a little on Saturday around 9 p.m., just under 2,300 PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric Company) customers in a portion of Oakdale lost power. Luckily for most of them, they only had to bear the powerless summer night for about three hours, as it was restored by midnight.

However, for 253 other customers, the power was out for over 20 hours, well into Sunday’s 105 degree heat; off for much of the day on Sunday, July 12. PG&E reported the cause of this to be underground equipment failure and said crews were finally able to restore the power to all impacted at 5:49 p.m. on Sunday. The failure was located near Maag Avenue and D Street in Oakdale and affected primarily the Burchell Hill area.

Brandi Merlo from PG&E explained: “When a power outage occurs we have system operators and troublemen in the field looking for ways to switch around the problem and restore as many customers as possible. In this case we were able to restore the majority of customers by rerouting their power around the problem area. The remaining customers had no back feed option to restore power and had to wait until the equipment was replaced.”

She further assured that PG&E constantly conducts maintenance and upgrades on equipment to prevent outages like these. However, outages can still happen for a number of reasons, so she encouraged customers to be prepared and seek information and tips at www.pge.com.