The last time PG&E Corp. shut off electricity in the Sierra Nevada foothills city of Placerville, Calif., Pop Art Custom Framing Gallery lost about $8,000 in four days, according to Daniel Anderson, who owns the store with his wife.
Now, the power is off again, part of a second wave of intentional blackouts PG&E began on Wednesday so that forecast high winds won’t knock down one of its lines and spark a wildfire. And Pop Art faces even more losses that Mr. Anderson says his family can’t afford.
“It’s not just the business you are losing, it’s the business you lose from someone who would bring in a friend,” Mr. Anderson said Wednesday after his store became one of the 179,000 cut off by PG&E.
During the bankrupt utility’s first major planned shutdown of power earlier this month, which affected some 750,000 customers, energy expert Michael Wara of Stanford University’s Woods Institute calculated the total economic losses at as much as $2.5 billion—largely based on lost industrial and commercial activity. There were no immediate estimates for how much this latest shut-off would cost, but small, independent businesses appeared to be particularly vulnerable to a second economic blow.
Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this month called on PG&E to reimburse small businesses $250 each for their lost power, a request officials of the company said they hadn’t yet had time to review. Several business owners scoffed at the amount.
That’s a drop in the bucket,” said Mr. Anderson. “That’s almost a slap in the face.”
In Placerville’s historic downtown, only four of the 86 merchants surveyed during the last outage had backup generators, said Heidi Mayerhofer of the Placerville Downtown Association. She estimates the businesses lost hundreds of thousands of dollars during the last blackout and stand to lose untold thousands more in the new shutdown, depending how long it lasts.
PG&E has said the current blackout should be shorter, because the expected winds are milder than the ones earlier this month. But the company also warned another, larger shut-off could come as soon as this weekend, based on a recent weather forecast.
“It’s a disaster here,” Ms. Mayerhofer said Wednesday afternoon, as she prepared to close ahead of the shutdown. “I’m racing home to get my generator on.”
In Tuolumne County, which serves as a gateway to Yosemite National Park, only 30 of about 3,000 registered businesses stayed open during the last shutdown because so few have generators, said Dave Thoeny, executive director at workforce-development agency Mother Lode Job Training.
Although the forested county was just outside the boundaries of the latest round of outages, businesses prepared just in case. In the town of Big Oak Flat, PML Hardware has been scrambling to fill its supplies of generators, batteries and other fuel-related items that were nearly sold out from the first phase of blackouts about two weeks ago, according to assistant manager Mark Parker.
“Our store was stripped clean of all those products,” he said.
Other small businesses hit by the first round but spared this time worry they may run into trouble down the road. After PG&E warned initially of the new outages earlier this week, the small grocery chain New Leaf Community Markets put refrigerated trucks on standby, created a list of deliveries it would halt and began preparing notifications that would tell employees and customers which stores would be impacted and when they would reopen.
“As smaller neighborhood markets, we do not have generators at our stores,” said Julie Teune, spokeswoman for the chain, whose stores in Half Moon Bay and Aptos near San Francisco lost power in the earlier shut-off.
Back in Placerville, business leaders said they would make do as best they can. During the last shutdown, some businesses without generators managed to stay partially open anyway—moving some of their merchandise out onto Main Street. Since there was no way to process credit cards, stores conducted transactions with cash and even IOUs, said Laurel Brent-Bumb, chief executive officer of the El Dorado County Chamber of Commerce.
“We truly have a pioneer spirit in our community,” she said. “We are going to carry on.”