At least 50 people lost power after a semi-truck collided with a utility pole on Peltier Road in Acampo on Tuesday afternoon, causing a significant amount of surge damage.Woodbridge Fire District responded to the collision at about 1:23 p.m., with reports of a grass fire and power lines down in a vineyard between North Bender and May roads.Battalion Chief Eric Edwards said that the semi-truck hit the power pole, which broke and sent the transmission line to the ground, sparking about 200 feet of fire along the roadside.C...
At least 50 people lost power after a semi-truck collided with a utility pole on Peltier Road in Acampo on Tuesday afternoon, causing a significant amount of surge damage.
Woodbridge Fire District responded to the collision at about 1:23 p.m., with reports of a grass fire and power lines down in a vineyard between North Bender and May roads.
Battalion Chief Eric Edwards said that the semi-truck hit the power pole, which broke and sent the transmission line to the ground, sparking about 200 feet of fire along the roadside.
Crews contained the fire relatively quickly, he said, but as of about 4:46 p.m. Tuesday, the area was still an active scene. The fire crew’s “mop-up” was delayed, he said, because of an electrocution risk in the vineyards.
Meters were damaged at several homes on Davis Road between Peltier and Woodbridge roads, Edwards said, adding that he believed the impact was more widespread than shown by a map on PG&E’s website.
Restoring power would “probably” take longer than PG&E’s projected 5:45 p.m., he said.
Acampo resident Craig Thompson said PG&E told resident power would return by 5 p.m. But as of 4:45 p.m., it had not returned, he said.
Thompson said he was home when he lost power and heard several small explosions.
"My meter was blown out of its socket, and some of the houses had sparks blowing out of their circuit cabinets," he said. "There was a blown-up transformer in the neighborhood. For the people affected, this was a huge surge."
Thompson the area has never had an outage of this magnitude. However, there was an incident about 20 years ago where a 60kv line fell onto a 120kv line that cause a power outage.
"What makes this outage unique is the level of surge damage," he said. "This is the most traumatic surge I've ever experienced in my life. I've never had meters blow out of the meter boxes."
News-Sentinel staff writer and California Local News fellow Hannah Weaver contributed to this report.