By MACKENZIE MAYS, ANGELA HART and COLBY BERMEL
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Joe Fatula left the Bay Area in 2017 wanting to settle down in the mountains somewhere quiet. He chose Colfax, a small town rich with Gold Country history, and became mayor last year with the goal of boosting business on Main Street.
But his sanctuary turned apocalyptic in October. Every gas station, grocery store and restaurant closed due to massive power shutoffs as part of the state’s efforts to avoid a major wildfire. The mayor found himself loaning out his personal pickup truck and RV, which have built-in generators, to the town’s 2,000 residents as they scrambled to save food in their refrigerators, charge their phones and find a way to stay warm.
At all levels of government — from state officials to small-town mayors — California leaders are in uncharted territory, and scrambling to adjust their plans and operations to the realities of regular disruption. For now, their only answer to calamitous wildfires is shutting off power to millions of residents in advance, which residents now lament as a man-made disaster. Mike McGuire, the state senator representing the Santa Rosa area devastated by fires in 2017, said California is “the canary in the coal mine” as climate change threatens to upend life across the world.
Residents in some of California’s most bucolic settings are stuck figuring it out on their own, rich and poor, urban and rural alike. While Fatula navigated his working-class community with generators in his pickup, NBA star LeBron James was forced to flee his estate near Los Angeles in the middle of the night, “driving around with my family trying to get rooms,” he said in a tweet.
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Power Shutoff’s equal california politicians getting us ready for a future of “green energy” as our only source of electricity.