The California wildfires and PG&E’s incompetence are having a terrifying impact on the residents of California, who face not only immense risk to life and property, but a growing number of power and telecom-related outages that make a bad problem worse.
There are more than a dozen wildfires currently raging across California, and heavy winds this week are only expected to exacerbate the problem. PG&E plans to cut power to more than half a million California residents this week as the ill-prepared company attempts to mitigate harm caused by its antiquated infrastructure.
The fires and power outages are also having a profound impact on the state’s telecom networks. According to data released by the FCC, 874 of the state’s 26,000 cell sites were out on Monday, up from 630 on Sunday. Given the majority of these sites have no backup power, they’re useless once fire or PG&E’s rolling blackouts come knocking.