PG&E's wildfire slideshow gets tested by a real outage at Broadway and Bolinas
This week opened with PG&E walking Fairfax's Citizen's Disaster Council through its layered wildfire mitigation strategy — weather stations, powerline safety settings, hardened equipment, undergrounding and vegetation management — plus 2019-2025 Public Safety Power Shutoff data and planned 2026 tweaks meant to shrink how many customers lose power and for how long.
It closes with PG&E owing the town a much more specific accounting: on September 2, the utility returns to explain the August 15 underground vault fire and power outage at Broadway and Bolinas Road, one of Fairfax's busiest intersections. The agenda lists it as a presentation only, with no staff recommendation or Council action attached — the town wants an explanation, but hasn't signaled it's demanding anything more.
The juxtaposition is hard to miss: a utility that spent an April briefing detailing shutoff triggers and grid-hardening programs is now being asked to explain a failure that happened anyway, right downtown. The same September 2 meeting also features a Marin County briefing on emergency preparedness for the 2026–27 El Niño season, putting infrastructure resilience at the center of the night.