A crash on Big Hill Road near the Ledge Lane intersection knocked down PG&E and AT&T lines around 11 p.m. Thursday, leaving 20 PG&E customers without service and prompting crews to work through the cleanup on Friday.
The California Highway Patrol said the vehicle involved was a small, white crossover and that no one was injured. Lines were across the roadway after the crash, but traffic was again moving freely on Big Hill Road while PG&E and AT&T crews remained at the site.
PG&E said it expected full restoration by 1 p.m. today. Some AT&T customers may also be affected. One of the poles was completely sheared, a sign that the outage was caused by a vehicle crash rather than weather and that both electric and communications service had to be repaired before the area could fully recover.
The immediate risk has passed, but the damage was broad enough to disrupt two systems at once. By the time drivers were moving through the road again, the harder work had shifted to the utility crews, who still had to replace broken infrastructure and bring every affected customer back online.