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Shutoffs in much of the Bay Area came later and affected fewer customers Wednesday night and Thursday morning than Pacific Gas & Electric Co. had initially indicated. The warm, dry offshore gusts that had prompted red-flag fire warnings across California were delayed or milder than expected.
“We faced a choice between hardship or safety, and we chose safety,” said Michael Lewis, PG&E’s senior vice president for electric operations.
PG&E began restoring power to Bay Area residents Thursday, taking its first steps in what could be a days-long process to end an outage that left more than 700,000 customers without power. The utility’s move to take massive swathes of its power grid offline in order to avoid sparking wildfires — the largest planned shutdown in its history — left Northern Californians fuming about the short notice, confusing directives and scale of the blackouts.