California's largest utility has intentionally cut power to roughly 500,000 customers in Northern California -- a number that's scheduled to rise later Wednesday in what could be a dayslong outage -- as the company tries to prevent wildfires during extremely windy and dry conditions.
Pacific Gas & Electric started the shutoff early Wednesday, leaving parts of 22 counties -- including northern portions of the San Francisco Bay Area -- in the dark. As many as 300,000 additional customers are expected to lose power later in the day -- including in Alameda and Santa Clara counties, which contain the Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose areas -- for a total of 800,000 homes, businesses and other buildings affected, the company said.