In October, PG&E turned off the lights for thousands of houses in Northern California.

More 800,000 properties, including homes in Placer County, lost power.

The suddenly dormant grid caused a plethora of grievances and more importantly, an estimated $2.5 billion  in outage costs.

“As a whole, the outage caused a lot of frustration between us,” Granite Bay High sophomore Megan Morales said. “There was little time to just sit down because of the preparations and precautions we had to take to combat it.”

The outage lasted for multiple days  for some, which made life increasingly hard and situations dire.

“We are on a well, so it means no water,” health teacher John MacCleane said. “It means no bathrooms. It means no showers, and they kept our power off for four days.”

This lack of power was because of  potential fire conditions in the area that caused PG&E concerns. 

The company said there were high winds, low humidity and dry weather that could create a dangerous situation that would threaten the safety of its customers.

These were the same conditions that prevented the bonfire at the annual Homecoming Bonfire Rally last month,  a decision that was met with a rage hotter than the missing bonfire.

“(The fire department) didn’t even tell the administration (about the bonfire cancellation),” student government teacher Tamara Givens said. “(Student government) didn’t know until we got the email from the county fire department. I honestly don’t know why they called it 30 hours before we lit the fire.”

Pulling the plug on energy in the area was likely a proactive action taken by PG&E which has faced major repercussions for accidently igniting the fire last year in Paradise that killed 85 people.

However, the precautious actions of PG&E had a major backlash.

“The worst part about it is that they turned it off because of the wind, (but) there was never wind up where we lived,” MacLeane said. “My son lives in Davis and said the wind woke him up that morning. It was shaking the house so much, but they didn’t turn off their power.”

The public and media alike criticized the company for its lack of safety and preparation for the disaster caused by one of its transmission lines which clearly forced PG&E’s hand in this situation.

The outages seemed endless. Even after the original outage, PG&E warned that 500,000 houses would be off the grid again.

MacLeane said he’s been told his power would be turned off before, but PG&E had never followed through with it.

“It’s kind of like the boy who cried wolf,” MacLeane said. “(So this time), we weren’t as prepared as we could have been.”

Of course it is better to be safe than sorry, but the powerless people in Northern California were forced into a predicament as the lack of warning created a frenzy of desperation and panic.

“By the time they told us it was really happening, we didn’t have enough time to do really anything about it,” said biology teacher Heidi McKeen.

Residents in the 34 counties affected had to rush to stores and gas stations to stock up on supplies for the barren days ahead of them.

“The main thing we lost was a good deal of money towards buying ice and gas,” Morales said. “We were driving around so much, looking around for stores selling ice, and that wasted a lot of gas that we had to refill.”

Many people were unaware of all the equipment that runs on PG&E’s power and got caught off guard with so little time to prepare.

“We had to throw out a lot of food in our freezer and refrigerator,” senior Tori Harriman said.

Basic niceties that many would take for granted were stripped away from thousands of families making life unexpectedly challenging.

“You walk in a room and flip a light switch because your kid is scared of the dark,” McKeen said. “(During the power outage), there is nothing you can do about that.”

Besides the obvious things, like freezers and lights, there were utilities that were not accounted for, which were very inconvenient to live without.

McKeen lives in a rural area where there aren’t hardlines for cell service so her family lost the ability to communicate.

“In addition to losing power, we didn’t have great cell phone service which is worrisome,” McKeen said. “If something happens not only do we not have power, but we don’t have a great way of getting people if we need help.”

The lack of power surging through houses was irritating at best and excruciating at worst. And although PG&E kept Northern California safe the repercussions seem to be all that people are talking about.