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By John Ramos John Ramos John Ramos accidentally launched a lifelong career in journalism when he began drawing editorial cartoons and writing smart-alecky satire pieces for the Bakersfield High School newspaper. Read Full Bio October 13, 2026 / 7:21 PM PDT / CBS San Francisco Add CBS News on Google On Tuesday, PG&E announced possible power shutoffs for some fire-prone portions of the Bay Area. One of them is Berkeley, where hot winds and wildfire dangers may be on their way.
On Tuesday in Berkeley, it was still a cool breeze off the Bay, but by Wednesday, the warm inland winds were expected to arrive, bringing with it the conditions for wildfire. In a press release, PG&E said: "The potential Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) event, starting Wednesday evening and forecasted to last through Saturday afternoon, could affect approximately 70,000 customers across twenty-nine counties." At this point, they were predicting more than 4,700 homes could be blacked out in Alameda County, most of them in the Berkeley Hills, but according to the online map, also including the entire UC Berkeley campus. "When it turns around like that and blows the other way, we're getting the hot air from the valley," said resident Robin Beauchamp.
"And if there's a lot of kindling and fire fuel on the ground, all it takes is a source of ignition." There's not a lot of kindling around Beauchamp's home. He's someone who has taken fire mitigation to heart. Two years ago, he began removing all the trees and vegetation near the house.
The backyard fountain gives it a peaceful, Zen-like quality. But being located just over the ridge from Tilden Park and Wildcat Canyon, Beauchamp has a hard time breathing a sigh of relief. He said he's still worried when the hot winds begin blowing, despite working so hard to harden his home.
"Yeah, because my neighbors haven't," he said. "You can see all these houses are 10 feet from each other. Because that was the minimum setback.
If one house catches on fire, the heat from that house can ignite the one next door. It's going to keep going. It'll become what they call a conflagration.
It's not a wildfire anymore when structures start contributing the fuel." That's what has cost PG&E billions of dollars in settlements and why they now proactively cut off power to neighborhoods, sometimes for days on end. For now, the prediction is that a PSPS could last for up to two days. But if that should happen in Berkeley, Bill Buchholz could become a pretty popular guy.
"Everybody else is worried about power outages, and I'm saying to my neighbors, well, come on over to my house. I've got power all the time," he said. That's because, along with solar panels, Buchholz installed a battery storage system in his garage.
"I don't even know when the power goes off," he said. "I just see a little bit of a flicker and this thing kicks on instantly." But he also takes the fire threat seriously and has cleared out most of the plants from beside his house. Buchholz bought the home 12 years ago and said, back then, wildfire was far from people's minds.
"We're one block away from the Hayward earthquake fault, so we had a whole community of people that were most concerned with earthquakes," he said. "And nobody was talking about fire at all!" But the 2017 Wine Country fires in Napa and Sonoma changed all that. "It did.
Yes, it was a big wake-up call," he said. Now, Berkeley is considered a "FireWise" community, with a coordinated, city-wide effort to reduce the risk. But when it comes to wildfire, they're not out of the woods yet.
Fire officials said even though a "red flag" warning had not yet been declared, they were monitoring the weather and the moisture content of vegetation which can change in a matter of hours.
Source: CBS News
