Power outages in Northern California as winds bring wildfire danger Power is shut off in the San Francisco Bay Area as blackouts set to affect millions of Californians begin in the face of hot, windy weather that raises the risk of wildfires. Pacific Gas & Electric, which announced the deliberate outage, is working to prevent a repeat of a catastrophe last November in which faulty power lines it owned were determined to have sparked California's deadliest wildfire in modern history.