Livermore neighbors struggle with ongoing power problems
LIVERMORE, Calif. (KTVU) - When you buy electricity, beyond the electrons you use, you're paying for reliability: meaning when you flip the light switch, the power will be there. But on Livermore's Arlington Road, reliability has been a problem for years and hints at a potentially far deeper problem with PG&E itself.
Residents of Livermore's Arlington Road say power problems are becoming unbearable for its 17 homes.
On Tuesday, the lights were out once again disturbing home life and several home-based businesses.
"Again, today, our power is out. It happens, probably two or three times a week. For the last six, eight months, sometimes it's out for 13 hours," says Livermore resident Diana who chose not to give KTVU her last name.
"2010, and basically, that's how long we've been dealing with this," adds resident Allen Griffin.
"My records indicate there have been nine power outages over the last two plus years and the power outages range between 50 minutes and 750 minutes," further adds resident Mark Higuera.
PG&E says it knows of only 10 outages since 2010, five of which came in this year.
When a KTVU crew showed up Tuesday, PG&E crews were, once again, trying to make repairs because many previous attempts have only lead more outages.
But, the PG&E employee in a lift bucket told our photographer, if we took his picture, he'd sue.
We took the pictures anyway because there is no prohibition of shooting pictures of people on public streets.
Then, the crew decided to leave the location, repairs incomplete, giving this reason, "We asked him to stop filming and he won't," said the crew chief.
Residents reacted this way. "Completely unacceptable. It doesn't matter. It's their job. We don't have another place to go," says resident Amber Bond. "And now they're spending all their TV dollars on ‘how good we are’ over and over and over again. It's a smoke screen," says resident Stan Tynan. "I hope that this doesn't delay things from happening and stuff like that. I hope everybody can get to an agreement because, you know, all I want is my electricity," says resident Allen Griffin.
A while later, several PG&E supervisors showed up and ordered the crew to restart work saying the crew stopped work because they regarded the media as a distraction affecting safety.
"They are focused on restoration work and so, that's really their main charge, insuring that they are restoring power to customers as quickly as possible," says PG&E spokeswoman Nicole Liebelt.
As to the unending repairs themselves, spokeswoman Liebelt says this, "We do have plans to increase reliability in this area and, in fact, that reliability work is scheduled to take place as early as next week."
That prompted this concern. We are experiencing this obviously continually and the problem obviously is not getting fixed. It appears to us to be a Band-Aid approach rather than a permanent fix," says Higuera.
"The writing in this neighborhood was put in in 1967 and they allocated money to fix it, then San Bruno blew up and I think they scrapped the money," says Diana.
In fact, homeowner Mark Higuera says he spoke to a PG&E engineer in the Hayward office. "And he said that this project has been on the drawing board for some time and there have been some funding issues over the last couple of years," he said.
If PG&E is diverting money from its electric operations to pay for ongoing repairs and upgrades to natural gas operations, that could be a violation of what the California Public Utilities Commission approved in PG&E's electric rates.
PG&E has promised a written statement soon.
If PG&E is diverting money from its electric operations to pay for ongoing repairs and upgrades to natural gas operations, that could be a violation of what the California Public Utilities Commission approved in PG&E's electric rates.
PG&E says overall reliability has improved every year since 2009, to the fewest number of outages in company history last year and on track to do better this year.