Rain lingers over parts of California from big, slow-moving storm systems, spreading across the state as the storms churn northward from the Pacific Ocean. But in the last month, strong, windy storms developed that brought torrential rain, hail, and hailstones, with a lot of power outages.
“They were a little too active over the last month,” said Paul Hamers, spokesman for the California Energy Commission, which oversees the state’s power grid. “The worst of the storms are over but there are still lots of power outages, so we are having to work our way back to full normalcy.”
This summer brought two such storms. The first moved over California in early June, bringing torrential rain and strong winds and leading to a week-long black-out. In late June, the state was still grappling with the June 5 and 6 storms, each of which brought torrential rain and snow and caused rolling power outages as much as 70 miles across.
A few storms come close each year, but the storms of this summer were especially intense, prompting Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency last week in an attempt to keep the grid running and people safe from power outages.
This is the first time since at least 2009 that the state has had these two huge storms in a single year, Brown said.
“We are seeing the impacts of the storms and their impacts now,” he said. “This is what we call a wet and windy spring. We are seeing wet and windy, dry and windy, dry and windy with a lot of rain and a lot of strong waves.”
More than 4.8 million people in the state are now without power. More than 25,000 customers in the Los Angeles area are still without power, after losing about 300,000 customers on the day the storm hit, officials estimate.
Although California now appears to be back to full service, Hamers said the first two storms of the year were the hardest storms.
California’s electric grid operates on a system of 60,000 miles of low-voltage, direct current transmission lines that go from the power plants in northern California to the power plants in southern California, which provides power to about 40 million homes and businesses in the two states.
About 80 percent of the state’s power is
