PG&E blames birds for Tri-Valley power outages

DUBLIN — Until now, the public has been largely in the dark about why 7,000 customers throughout the Tri-Valley have repeatedly lost power at seemingly random times throughout the last few months. According to a city council agenda filed ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, PG&E blamed birds for disrupting the region’s power supply.
Tamar Sarkissian, a PG&E spokeswoman, said via email that bird-caused outages are “not something we have seen often in this area before, but have experienced it elsewhere.”
“While some animal contacts involve large birds with wide wingspans, these incidents involved what appeared to be hundreds of small blackbirds that can sag lines or cause lines to contact one another, triggering outages,” Sarkissian said.
PG&E has made 40,000 power poles and towers “bird safe” since 2002, Sarkissian added, and in 2023 replaced 8,500 poles in areas of high bird or “raptor” concentration.
The investor-owned utility company implemented “bird mitigation steps” on Oct. 24. In the Collier and Doolan canyon areas, a “bird guarding tool” was installed on above-ground powerlines “which should help mitigate future animal contacts.” PG&E also may later install a breaker at the circuit split location on Collier Canyon Road, a city report says.
“This caused a lot of inconvenience for our residents,” Dublin Vice Mayor Sherry Hu said Monday. “This is something we hope won’t happen again.”
Hu said residents called her into the early morning hours during several unexpected outages in October to ask why their lights had gone dark. She said she had never heard of birds causing major repeated outages in the Dublin-area until now.
At the time, the city didn’t have any answers, except that the power lines were sensitive due to high temperatures. The Dublin City Council on Tuesday is expected to receive an update on ongoing unplanned power outages which have plagued thousands of residents for months.
The update from City Manager Colleen Tribby is likely to include information from past meetings with PG&E officials detailing the causes of several recent outages stretching back through mid-October.
The outages follow a summer where frustrated Tri-Valley residents, including many in Pleasanton and Livermore, suffered losses of power amidst a widespread heat wave which pushed temperatures above 100 degrees in some areas. In June, 3,500 customers lost power in Pleasanton, with portions of south and west Pleasanton being hit the hardest. At the time, PG&E blamed excessive triple-digit temperatures.
Dublin officials met with PG&E on Oct. 28, where the energy supplier said that outages on Oct. 17 and 23 were caused by “by contact on highly sensitive powerlines in the Doolan Canyon area (unincorporated Alameda County),” according to Tuesday’s council agenda.
“The contact combined with the high sensitivity setting forced a shutoff of the entire circuit therefore causing an unplanned outage,” the report says.
The city maintains it requested “there be mitigation efforts to address the outages and the concerns of Dublin residents.”
“PG&E also acknowledged and apologized for the lack of direct communication with the City following the recent unplanned EPSS outages,” the report says. “They confirmed that the proper notification process will be followed in the future.”