POWER SHUT OFFS, STRONG RED FLAG WINDS ARRIVE LATER TUESDAY.

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PG&E POWER SHUT OFFS

With a major statewide wind event beginning Tuesday, PG&E has announced power shut offs to some 15k or more customers spread across 17 counties in Northern and Central California. The shut offs begin Tuesday with 12 counties and expand Wednesday when the strongest winds arrive.

Power across mostly rural areas of North Bay counties will begin to be shut off Tuesday, with shut offs for some areas continuing Wednesday and Thursday.

To get your status, or the status of someone you know, visit this link: https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/

RED FLAG WINDS

The National Weather Service has issued a Red Flag Warning that includes large areas of the Bay Area, North Bay, Sacramento Area, Delta, Sierra and Central Coast. The Warning begins Tuesday at 11AM fand continues through Thursday at 7AM.

WIND EVENT DETAILS

A low pressure trough will dive south today through Nevada and Utah. Eventually this low will deepen and form a cutoff low. This will ramp up the pressure gradient between high and low pressure…a classic wind event scenerio for California. You can see the tightly packed pressure gradient map here.

This will cause strong north to northeast winds beginning late Tuesday and becoming very strong overnight into Wednesday morning. In this high resolution outlook you can see forecast winds at the 2500 foot level topping 50mph on the highest peaks of the North Bay in the early morning hours Wednesday.

At its peak, the wind event will cause wind gusts greater than 65 mph at elevations above 2K feet, and even has the potential to bring strong wind gusts into the valleys of the North Bay, the Bay Area and the Delta on Wednesday.

Those are quite strong surface wind gusts. That’s why it’s fortunate that we had recent rains across the region, because along with the strong winds, humidity is forecast to plunge overnight Tuesday and get even drier Wednesday and Thursday. Relative humidity may reach as low as the teens or single digits by Thursday afternoon.

The good news is that our fuels are still holding some moisture from the recent rains. And though the forecast of fuel moisture/energy release (green line) shows them drying, it also shows them staying above the most critical Energy Release Component values (red) through the wind event.

Still, it goes without saying that with the strong winds over the next three days, extreme vigilence will be required of everyone to insure that any fire starts don’t get out of hand. Even though fuel moisture isn’t historically low, it is low enough and winds will certainly be strong enought that a major fire could quickly erupt from any fire starts that do occur.

We’ll have more updates as needed as the wind event unfolds.