A huge Monterey pine collapsed onto overhead lines on Levee Road on Monday afternoon, cutting off power to 1,200 Inverness and Inverness Park households for more than 24 hours as squads of workers sawed up boughs and erected a new pole. The road was closed between Highway 1 and Bear Valley Road, forcing drivers on a four-mile detour between Inverness Park and Point Reyes Station.
“This is an unusually long outage and we appreciate everyone’s patience,” PG&E spokeswoman Deanna Contreras said on Tuesday. “We hope everybody is safe and everybody has a backup plan.”
Noisy generators, spoiled food and candlelit dinners may have been nuisances, but the outage also caused a potentially dangerous communication problem: Many landlines could not dial 911 on Tuesday. AT&T alerted the Marin County Sheriff’s Office that about 450 residents with 669 numbers might not be able to make emergency calls because the company’s 911 trunk line was down from 7 a.m. to about 9 p.m. The sheriff’s office provided an alternate emergency number but said no emergency calls came in from Inverness landlines during that time.
The problem could have been averted, one Inverness local told the Light. Late Sunday night, Christian Anthony was driving home from the airport when he noticed that a branch on the same pine was caught in high voltage lines and was smoldering overhead. He told deputies at the Point Reyes Station substation, who alerted PG&E. Power was out in Inverness for roughly an hour and a half as a crew trimmed back the branch. By 1 a.m. Monday morning, the trimmers were gone and power was restored.
But the crew missed a more fundamental problem: The tree branch was touching the wires because the trunk itself was beginning to lean over the road. On Monday, when PG&E employees returned to finish cutting the branch back, they noticed the issue—too late. Just after noon, the tree came crashing down while they watched, crushing both the power lines on the far side of the road and the telecommunications lines immediately below it.
“Seems like they didn’t address the bigger reason why it was in the wires,” Mr. Anthony said.
Just after 1 p.m. on Tuesday, the power was back on in Inverness after PG&E examined the affected lines by helicopter.