AP Exclusive: Utility lacked basic training before blackouts

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — When Pacific Gas & Electric cut power to large swaths of wildfire-prone Northern California last fall, few of the emergency personnel managing the blackouts for the nation’s largest utility had learned the fundamentals of managing an emergency in their home state.

The utility entered 2019 planning to “de-energize” its aging electric grid during autumn windstorms, so that downed lines couldn’t spark a blaze. Yet among the hundreds of people who handled the blackouts from PG&E’s emergency operations center, only a handful had any training in the disaster response playbook that California has used for a generation, The Associated Press found.

Predictably enough, the October 2019 outages brought chaos from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Sierra Nevada, as more than 2 million people lost power.

Computers went dark, phones stopped working as did gas pumps, elevators, traffic lights, water pumps, stoves, medical devices — the list seemed endless.

Fast forward to this fall. PG&E’s catchphrase for the blackouts is “smaller, shorter, smarter.” By many accounts, the three power shutoffs so far have indeed been smoother.

That improvement reflects more than just infrastructure upgrades and a year to finetune. Chastened by its failures and required by state regulators, PG&E sought the training it had neglected.

As its name suggests, the Standardized Emergency Management System helps institutions as different as a massive utility and a rural county enter a public disaster with a built-in plan. The blueprint covers a range of issues, including how to share information and how to structure emergency operation centers. It also creates a common vocabulary -- an important tool given the collision of jargon and acronyms when...