From the Santa Cruz County Business Council:

October was a dark month for much of northern California. In response to the growing, and now seemingly annual severe wildfire threat, Pacific Gas and Electric implemented mandatory power shutoffs that affected many parts of our community. Now regardless of whether you support this strategy for preventing additional fireworks as a result of equipment failure, or downed lines, etc., there’s not a whole lot you can do to prevent this strategy from happening in the short term. However, the impacts that our community as a whole,and especially our business community have been feeling are very real, and they need to be documented for the purposes of evaluation.

Specifically, we need to understand exactly how these shutoffs affected our local businesses, both in terms of direct costs (loss of inventory, reduced hours, etc.); and in terms of indirect costs (missed business opportunities, overtime pay to staff to maintain critical functions, etc.). Otherwise, we won’t be able to effectively mitigate some of these impacts the next time there is a high probability of a severe wildfire(s) ravaging our state.

To this end, the Santa Cruz County Business Council has created a survey for local business owners and managers to document these impacts and estimate the total dollar amount of these power shutoffs on their bottom line.

Was your company or organization, or that of someone you know, affected by the outages? Did you/they lose any inventory? What about staffing? Were employees not able to work? Or perhaps they had to work overtime to keep essential functions operational? We want to hear from you.

You can take the survey by visiting this link here