Thousands of customers without power in San Joaquin County in unplanned outage

Thousands of San Joaquin County residents are without power following an unplanned PG&E outage, officials said. The utility company said the outage was necessary due to “grid instability issues.”PG&E said around 4:30 p.m. Thursday it began de-energizing some customers in Stockton and Manteca, “in order to rebalance the grid.”At one point, the number of outages across the county grew to more than 61,000 as of 7:30 p.m. That number was reduced to 44,464 unplanned outages as of 8:30 p.m. The majority of the outages appeared to be in the cities of Manteca and Tracy based on the utility’s outage map. In Manteca, 22,175 residents were without power and in Tracy, 18,638 were without power as of 8:30 p.m.In Lathrop, 8,000 residents were without power as of 5:50 p.m., but power was restored to most by 8:30 p.m. The outages come on the same day other portions of the county had planned outages, in what PG&E calls public safety power shutoffs. Learn more about those here. Only 948 of the outages were due to the utility’s public safety power shutoff. PG&E estimates the power will be restored after two hours, but said some areas could take longer.See PG&E’s outage map here. See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel