Penn Valley, CA — After weeks of frequent and unplanned power outages, Pacific Gas and Electric Company notified Rough and Ready and Penn Valley customers that they should be “grateful that they’re not dead” from their incompetence.
The announcement, which shocked but did not surprise their customers, comes after several years of PG&E murdering 85 in the recent Camp fire in Paradise, CA, and 117 people since 2010.
“We want to thank our customers for their patience,” said PG&E chief mouthpiece Bethany Billbright. “We understand the inconvenience service disruptions can cause. And we’d like to remind them that the outages represent safety precautions, not our ability to maintain and service our power distribution systems. Certainly, an outage is better than burning to death.”
For weeks the residents of Rough and Ready and Penn Valley have suffered through random power outages during triple digital heat waves with no explanations from PG&E. Many of the outages lasted more than 6 hours.
Five years have passed since the California utility PG&E was placed on probation for its conviction in the 2010 explosion of a natural gas pipeline that resulted in the deaths of eight people. In January of 2022, Federal Judge William Alsup stated that utility has failed to rehabilitate itself and that Californians remain “stuck in a sad era of PG&E wildfires” since the company neglected its responsibilities for decades.
According to Alsup, PG&E has started 31 wildfires while on probation, killing 113 Californians, consuming roughly 1.5 million acres, and destroying nearly 4,000 structures. The utility is accused of some of the state’s largest fires, including the Dixie Fire in Northern California last summer, which burnt over 963,000 acres and damaged 1,300 structures.
But PG&E has a solution: stock options for Nevada County residents.
As with the 13.5 billion dollar Camp Fire Settlement, the utility giant has proposed paying Penn Valley and Rough and Ready customers in stock options when they burn to death, die from heat exposure, or suffocate when their medical equipment runs out of backup battery supplies.
“Many people aren’t aware that much of Camp Fire settlement was paid out in stock options,” continued Ms. Millbright. “Because nothing says sorry for charred Grandpa than a pile of stock equities from the company that murdered him. I mean, manslaughtered him. So we’re offering stock options in place of service disruptions for our Penn Valley and Rough n Ready customers. That is when they die.”
As usual, the Union of Grass Valley has been silent on these disruptions, preferring not to investigate the causes of the outages in favor of simply repeating PG&E’s service status on their website and social media pages.
As for Rough and Ready and Penn Valley customers, they feel like no one is listening to them. Which, of course, is correct.
