By Bay City News.
A spokesperson for PG&E said Wednesday that this week's storm has caused the utility's largest number of outages in nearly 30 years, affecting more than 1.4 million customers since Sunday across its service area.
Nearly 38,000 customers in the Bay Area remained without power as of 2 p.m. Wednesday, a total that was up from about 35,000 earlier that day. Most of the affected customers are in the South Bay, which has more than 19,000 without power, and the North Bay, where nearly 14,000 are without power, said PG&E spokeswoman Fiona Chan.
The increase in outages coincided with another round of rain and wind that hit the region, dropping more than a half-inch of rain in parts of the Bay Area since Wednesday morning, according to the National Weather Service.
As the atmospheric river began blowing through the region, Sunday saw the largest number of blackouts in a single day since the beginning of PG&E's modern blackout recording period in 1995.
In recent days, the storm snapped or downed more than 700 PG&E power poles and damaged hundreds of transformers, according to the utility, which has about 5,000 employees and contractors working to restore power.
PG&E crews will have better conditions to deal with later this week. Although some showers are still possible in the Bay Area later Wednesday, dry weather is expected Thursday morning and into the weekend, according to the weather service.
A list of community resource centers established to assist affected residents and more information about PG&E's response to the storm's impacts can be found at https://www.pgecurrents.com/articles/3918-pg-e-responding-atmospheric-river- storm outages.
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