Talk about a game-changer on the grid.
When the threat of fire reaches bright red, SDG&E will launch a pre-emptive retreat from the backcountry.
Cut the power and run.
When the Santa Ana winds scream through the valleys and the mercury spikes, you're out there on your own, folks. There may be no smoke in the air, but our probability tables say there might be if hot wires are swinging, so we're flipping the switch.
Many of us are prepped, more or less, for the Big One, the mother of all earthquakes.
But SDG&E's hotter-than-hell weather policy, designed without public debate, orders up panic mode before the china starts shaking.
When the storm hits the fan, God may be in heaven, but the Grid is dead.
The practical question you have to ask is this: Where can I buy generators and old-fashioned plug-in phones that don't rely on electricity?
Or more practical yet, where can I buy stock in those companies that make it possible to function when San Diego Gas & Electric turns off the power?
You thought Y2K created a good market for survivalist-style supplies?
SDG&E's bombshell, dropped late last week, just may be the bailout Home Depot needs to weather the recession in fine form.
This sweeping unplug policy is an electric bolt out of the blue, an astonishing Hail Mary play.
The blowback against SDG&E from water districts and others in the backcountry is predictable, especially since we've entered October, which California author Joan Didion memorably described as “the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously.”
We'd better think this thing through now, not later.
“Is it prudent, or is it politics?” wondered Don Wood, a retired SDG&E power efficiency adviser.
I'll tell you, in this drought-plagued region, still hideously disfigured from last year's wildfires, the two motives dovetail into one self-preserving strategy.
An army of lawyers is lined up to bleed SDG&E white for its catalytic roles in the Witch Creek, Guejito and Rice Canyon fires.
To defend itself from universal hostility, SDG&E has argued that you have to take a holistic, not a legalistic, view of last year's infernal blazes.
“Hurricane-force Santa Ana winds” assaulted SDG&E's system to the breaking point, the utility has said.
The inconvenient truth of the matter, SDG&E implies, is that climate change may be spawning howling devil winds of untold ferocity.
In this hellish landscape, no aboveground grid, no matter how carefully maintained and monitored, could withstand the onslaught without throwing off the odd spark.
That's been the arc, if you will, of SDG&E's self-defense.
Now SDG&E is taking its holistic defense – which may or may not reduce its liability in court – one giant step further. It's changing the rules of the game to bolster its case that, under certain circumstances, there's nothing to do but flip the switch.
When the winds kick up like crazy, SDG&E will shut off the power – and pray no one dies from the lack of lifesaving juice.
One thing is dead certain: SDG&E has in its hands the most powerful order to evacuate imaginable.
A media warning is one thing. A Reverse 911 call is another. A blackout works on a whole different level.
Only the truly self-reliant souls in the backcountry will be prone to stick around when the grid goes dead, when the computers die and unforeseen problems start to manifest themselves.
To be fair, we have to assume that SDG&E has weighed the negatives and positives of emergency power outage.
The trigger level has been raised to apocalyptic levels. The early indication is that, if the policy had been in place, power would have been shut off just twice in the past 10 years.
Most important, SDG&E has changed the narrative of the fire next time.
With this dramatic policy, it has become practically a throwaway line that SDG&E is promising to rejuvenate its aging system.
By focusing attention on ultimate impotence in the face of the next apocalypse, SDG&E is deflecting attention from the thousands of small but smart measures necessary to make the system safer and sounder under predictable conditions.
In a utopian world, which this one clearly is not, all power lines would be buried underground – or they would be obsolete in a wireless landscape.
You're dreaming, realists say. Too expensive. Too futuristic.
Maybe so. But we can dream, can't we?
It sure beats thinking clearly about the region's power source sending out the chilling message that when it's arguably needed most, it plans to go dark.
Logan Jenkins: (760) 737-7555; logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com.
