California braces for renewed fire threat from windy weather

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Dry, windy weather posed an extreme wildfire risk Wednesday in Northern California, where massive blazes already have destroyed hundreds of homes and killed or injured dozens of people.

The National Weather Service issued a red-flag warning for extreme fire danger from 5 a.m. through Friday morning. With bone-dry humidity and wind gusts possibly hitting 55 mph, Pacific Gas & Electric warned that it may cut power Wednesday evening to as many as 54,000 customers in 24 counties.

The renewed dangerous weather conditions developed as most of the huge fires that erupted over the past eight weeks have been fully or significantly contained and skies once stained orange by heavy smoke were blue again.

Preemptive electricity cuts are a strategy aimed at preventing fires from being started by damaged power lines that have been damaged or knocked down amid high winds.

“We really view it as a last resort option,” said Mark Quinlan, the company’s incident commander.

The utility also has deployed generators and other measures to keep electricity flowing in some areas that might loose power during the outages, Quinlan said.

About 33,000 homes and businesses could begin losing power at 6 p.m., mainly in the Sierra Nevada foothills and northern San Francisco Bay Area, followed by 21,000 other customers two hours later in other portions of the Sierras and the Bay Area, along with portions of California's central coast, PG&E said.

The figures for affected customers range from more than 11,300 in Butte County, 6,000 in Santa Cruz County and around 5,400 customers in Alameda County to just 10 in Yolo County, according to the utility.

About 200 people in Humboldt County in the far northern part of the state could lose power Thursday afternoon as winds...