George Rebane

Like many folks in Nevada County last night, Jo Ann and I were listening to the limbs crashing down around our house wondering if the next one would come through the roof.  The wet snowfall – ‘Sierra cement’ – wreaked havoc across the foothills and turned out the lights for most of us in western county.  They are still out.  After the sun came up things didn’t get any better, but now we could see the damage and witness the crashing of more ‘widow makers’.

As friends Russ Steele and Bob Crabb report, others were not as fortunate as we (knocking on my noggin).  Both had damage to their houses from falling trees and limbs.

We and the neighbors played generator derby, turning them on and off to save fuel.  It seems that no one knows how long the power will be off.  The damage was so extensive and the outages so many that PG&E crews are swamped.  Calling their customer information number lets you play phone menu until you get to a recorded voice that assures us they are working as hard as they can, and the power will come on when it comes on.  Those who harbored thoughts that the PG&E crews were out there dawdling are, of course, heartened by such reports.

That kind of response was about all that KNCO has been able to put out.  Actually, they have had more information because people call in with outage, downed power lines, and blocked road news.  But PG&E isn’t more forthcoming with the mediat than they are with us.  When I called KNCO about the matter on the media line, I was told that PG&E is a lot less informative today than they were in days of yore when such storms ravaged the area.

My suggestion was for the media to ask PG&E to report how many people have had power restored since we know that about 23,000 accounts lost power.  This number they would surely be able to tell us, and that lets people at least come up with a guesstimate of progress and their own power restoration fortunes.  Again, I was told that PG&E wasn’t very forthcoming with that kind of information.  ‘We don’t know’ is their story, and they’re sticking to it – go suck eggs.

When all else fails, there is a bit of science that can be applied to this informational wasteland.  Some years back physicist Richard Gott came up with some complex reasoning about the termination of unknown processes.  I was able to reduce his arguments to a simple formula that you can apply in a few seconds with a calculator.  The question is ‘given an unkown but observable ongoing process that has been going on for a known period of time, what is the probability that it will terminate in the next interval of a given length?’

In our case the unknown process is PG&E’s repair efforts that will sooner or later include service to our house.  We want to know what is the ‘chance’ that power will be restored in, say, the next four hours.  As I write this, power has been out for about 20 hours at our house.  The formula for computing that power will come on some time during the next four hours is 4/(20 + 4) = 0.167 or one chance out of six.  More formally, if a process has been going on for time T, then  Prob(process ends during next t interval) = t/(T+t).  The complement T/(T+t) is, of course, the probability that it will end sometime after the next t interval.  So the chances that power will be restored to our house more than four hours from now is 5 out of 6 or 0.833.

This, dear reader, is the best that one can do with an absolutely minimal amount of information that is available about an ongoing process.  And this seems to be the exact amount that PG&E is willing to share with us.