DOWNIEVILLE — 2022 definitely went out with a bang along the upper reaches of the North Yuba River watershed at 10:55 p.m. on New Years Eve when an underground tranformer failed and left 909 PG&E customers without electricity in Downieville and Sierra City. By mid-afternoon on New Years Day, PG&E restored power to 887 of these customers by isolating the errant piece of equipment.

Unfortunately, while PG&E's strategy was quite deft for the majority of customers affected by the outage, 22 customers remained in the dark. Moreover, if they were relying upon electricity for heat, like The Mountain Messenger, they were in for a very cold night, as well, while PG&E rustled up a replacement for the failed transformer.

Thus, the Downieville 22 were very pleased on Monday morning a crew from PG&E's General Construction division based in Grass Valley arrived at 10 a.m. to begin the process of installing a new transformer.

With the old equipment removed around 1 p.m., the crew commenced to install its replacement.

By 4 p.m., with rain coming down, the power outage ended. Hurray!!!