San Diego Gas & Electric has begun a round of Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) affecting close to 35,000 customers across San Diego County, a precaution against wildfire risk as Santa Ana winds collide with an Extreme Heat Warning that runs through October 8. The outages started Friday, October 3, and are expected to continue through Monday evening, with inland and North County communities including Fallbrook, Valley Center, Ramona, Lakeside, and the Escondido area among more than 30 communities on the list, alongside Poway and El Cajon.
For San Diego-area small businesses, a multi-day power shutoff is more than an inconvenience — it can mean lost refrigeration, stalled point-of-sale systems, and days of lost revenue, especially for restaurants, cafes, and retailers that depend on card readers and walk-in traffic. Business owners in North County and East County communities on the shutoff list should treat this as a planning moment rather than a surprise: charge battery backups and phones now, know your POS provider’s offline-payment option, and move perishable inventory to a generator-backed location if one is available. If your business can operate on paper receipts or a mobile card reader with its own battery, test that workflow before you need it.
SDG&E has opened Community Resource Centers in several affected areas offering air conditioning, Wi-Fi, device charging, and water for residents and employees who need a place to ride out the heat and the outage, and the county’s 211 San Diego line can help connect business owners to additional resources. Checking SDG&E’s outage map directly, rather than relying on secondhand reports, is the fastest way to confirm whether a specific address is included before customers show up to a dark storefront.
Heat-driven PSPS events have become a near-annual fall pattern for San Diego County, and for North County business owners in particular, keeping a standing “outage kit” — a portable charger, a paper order pad, flashlights, and a current list of backup suppliers — is a low-cost way to stay open, or at least stay in communication with customers, when the grid goes down.
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Source: Times of San Diego
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