They expect and deserve. That helps them live their lives and run their businesses. And this weighs heavily on everyone, including us at pg e. This is not how we want to serve you. And this is not how we want to run our business. Were actually in the business of providing power, not taking power away. So we feel the impact of the decision, and i understand how it alters, how it disrupts the normal flow of life and the normal flow of community. But theres another part of the reality that were in. With winds like we saw over the last 24 hours or so and the condition of the vegetation, we simply could not continue to run parts of this system given the risk to Public Safety. We struggle with this decision, as we do with any decision to turn off power. We weigh the level of acceptable risk given the circumstances, the wind, and the vegetation, and we determine that we must have zero risk of a spark. So what exactly was the risk . Well, we know from history that wind speeds, the wind speeds at which our lines can be affect and cause a power. Wind speeds at about 45 miles an hour or higher lead to risk on the distribution lines, the little lines that go to your house or business of causing a fire, and about 55 miles an hour, that same risk appears on the transmission lines, which are the big wires that hook to the little wires. We also know what level of fuel content brings the highest risk of fire, how dry the grass and other plants are, what level of this brings the greatest risk of fire, and also how humidity affects us. So in this event, the fuel content of the vegetation was at critical levels, very dry. Humidity very low. And of the 33 counties that were affected by our actions so far, at least 21 had wind gusts above 45 miles an hour, and at least 15 had wind gusts of above 50. And we saw a peek wind gust at 77 Miles Per Hour in this event. So we faced a choice here between hardship on everyone or safety, and we chose safety. And i do apologize for the hardship this has caused, but i think we made the right call on safety. A call, by the way, we made on the twoyear anniversary of the devastating north bay fires, and less than a year after the horrific camp fire. So ive been asked this question, is this the new normal for us and our customers . For all california utilities and their customers, and actually, for the entire west . A number of the western states have now gone into the psps kind of program. And the answer is this is not the future any of us want to live in. Our goal over time is to reduce wildfire risk further across the system, to shut off power less frequently, and to further minimize the impact of shutoffs. We can do this through several parts of our Community WildfireSafety Program through system hardening, managing vegetation near lines, and better tools on situational awarenawarenawarenan sumeet singh are in charge and doing yeomans work. But the desire to have zero spark during conditions like weve had over the last several days, were very likely to have to make this kind of decision again in the future. And if and when we do, there are many things we need to do better next time than we did this time. First, we commit to communicating with our customers and communities with as much notice as possible, with as much clarity as possible, and as frequently as possible. We did not deliver on that commitment this time. Our website crashed several times. Our maps are inconsistent, perhaps incorrect. Our call centers were overload. To put it simply, we were not adequately prepared to support the operational event. And this will improve. Second, we commit to restoring power as quickly as possible. Now, we have to wait for the weather to pass, and then we have to inspect every line we turned off. Thats about 25,000 miles of line. And then when everything is good, we can turn the power back on and in a moment sumeet will tell you how many customers have already been restored. So thats the process. As i said at the beginning, i want to be clear on this. The buck stops with me on these events. I do have the benefit of 23,000 colleagues here at pg e to help me and a number of contractors. And they work the mechanics of the event and they do it well. But heres why i bring this up. If youre upset about this event, do not take it out on those folks. We have thousands of men and women, literally thousands out there right now working tirelessly to restore power, including many who actually lost power themselves. Weve had employees shot at, punched, used profanity, cursed, all kinds of bad things. These people are here to help you. Theyre working for your safety. Theyre bringing the lights back on, and they actually live in your communities. So its important that we let them do their work because we need them to do it. Ill conclude with this. I personally have a very simple primary goal, and its one of the reasons i came here to pg e. Which is to prevent any catastrophic events that have loss of life and property like the ones we had over the last two years. Thats my goal. So now let me ask sumeet singh to provide an Operational Update on where we are. Sumeet . Thank you, bill. And good evening and up this for joining us again. As of 5 00 p. M. This evening, our team of more than 6,300 employees and contractors along with 44 helicopters are actively enga engaged or supporting the conduct i conducting, safety inspections, repairing equipment, and restoring power across our service area. Of the approximately 738,000 customers that were impacted as a result of this event, we have restored power to approximately 31 , or 228,000 of our customers. Those restorations have occurred in parts sierra foothills, the bay area, as well as humbolt. We have about 510,000 customers that remain currently out of power, and we have teams, as i stated. Of more than 6,300 that are actively working at the moment to try to as safely and as quickly restore power to our customers who have been impacted. At this point in time, weve determined that the adverse weather conditions have subsided to the point where we could begin the safety inspections. We made that decision earlier this afternoon with the exception of a footprint in the sierra foothills that includes the paradise and the surrounding areas and the kern county, which we anticipate that the weather is going to subside later this evening and later tonight going into potentially tomorrow afternoon. And for these remaining counties where we have not commenced the safety inspections, we will continue to monitor the weather. And we will begin our safety inspections as soon as the weather subsides. So bill touched on this, and ill reiterate consistent with some of the discussions weve been having the last couple of nights. The process that we use to ensure that we safely restore power back to our customers, it first starts with the determination of what we call all clear, which is a determination where weather has passed our Respective Service territory and the risk of potential wildfires has subsided. Subsequent to that, our crews and our contractors are dispatched, and theyre already prestaged at those locations. So as soon as we get the all clear, we are ready to move into action to conduct the safety inspections, assess for damage, repair the damage, and then safely restore power to our customers. As part of the safety inspections that weve performed earlier today, we have found multiple cases of damage or hazard that has been suspected to be caused by the wind event such as fallen branches that have come in contact with our overhead lines. And if they were energized, could have potentially been the source of ignition had it not been for the shutoff. As a reminder, we can only conduct the safety inspections during daylight hours, and we will resume inspections at day break once they subside at the end of this evening. I also want to briefly recap the weather conditions that we experienced over the last 24 hours. As bill stated, wind speeds in fact did exceed our safety threshold in many areas, which is the 45 Miles Per Hour peak wind gust where we start the see vegetation potentially coming in contact with our distribution lines. As bill mentioned, in 21 of the counties, we have observed our peak wind gusts in excess of 45 miles an hour. A couple of examples that ill share with you, 77 miles an hour on Mount Saint Helena in Sonoma County. 54 Miles Per Hour in the northern part of napa county. 53 miles an hour recorded in placer county. 56 miles an hour in butte county. And 54 miles an hour in santa cruz county. Finally, to reiterate what bill mentioned, we sincerely appreciate the patience of our customers and our communities during this event and our subsequent inspections. We fully understand and appreciate the impact that this has on everyone, the hardships, the disruption, and i can assure you that we are working as safely and as quickly as possible to ensure the lines are safe and we can restore power as quickly as possible to our customers and our communities. With that, i will request our chief customer officer Laurie Giammona to come up here. Thank you all for joining us this evening. I first want to start out by saying, really offering our sincerist apology to our customers and our communities. As bill said, we dont take these decisions lightly. There were a series of analysis that we went through to make this decision, but we know this is a disruption to our communities, to our customer, to their families, to our neighbors, to the communities that we are honored to live in and work and be part of. So on behalf of all of our 23,000 employees, we feel the impact of this for our customers, and we want you to know that you have our support and our sincerist apologies. That being said, i too supported this decision in the name of being safe and protecting our customers. So i want to talk a little bit about what weve been doing for our customers, and i want to bring you back to what we talked about last evening. Yesterday when we made our first notification, we experienced unprecedented volume to our website. Now, we had done a lot of preplanning for these types of events, and we added capacity to our websites. We added capacity to our secondary websites. But we saw volume that we never expected to see hit our website when we notified our customers. Simultaneously, we saw similar impact to our call centers. Now of note, our call centers serve california customers. They serve pg e customers. We have 2,000 Customer Service employees that live and work in the communities in which we serve and serve our customers. They have been working 24 hours a day three this event, answering customer inquiries. While we have been working to stand up another website to serve our customers. And so as we talked about last evening, we stood up a second website throughout the evening and into the morning hours. We were testing the website for stability. The website has been stable roughout the day. Weve been able to serve customers through the website. Customers have been able to use the search functionality to determine if they are part of an outage. And now theyre using to determine their estimated time of restoration. Weve also leveraged the website to enable customers to find the addresses of our customer Resource Centers. The website has been stable throughout the day. Weve been enhancing it throughout the day to include additional languages as well as enhance the capabilities of the website for our vulnerable customers that are screen readers only. In additio as we talked about last evening, weve opened an operationized 33 customer Resource Centers. Weve had almost 4,000 visitors to those Resource Centers throughout the last 24 hours. Weve been providing updates for customers, water, charging, rest room facilities. Weve had many customers that have joined us at the Resource Centers that have come to charge their devices, have come to charge their medical devices, and have come as a place for support. Well continue to keep those Resource Centers open in the counties as long as we are restoring customers. Whats important for customers to note now is that there is not another psps event in this event. So if you have not been notified but you think you might be in an area that is affected, you are not going to be affected. So i think its important to note that for customers that are in an area if you go to our outage map and the community is still out, but you are not out, there is not another plan to psps event at this time. We have experienced other intermittent outages for other reasons, and so if you were to go to the website while it might not be a psps outage, you might see there is an outage in your area, but it is not psps related. So its important for customers to know if they have not received an outage notification from us at this time, that we are going to proactively deenergy, were not going proactively deenergy those customers. In addition to the support that i just outlined, we have a number of other areas that were supporting customers. As we went into this event, we stopped all credit and collection and disconnect activity for our entire customer base. We will resume that practice and those processes once the event is completed. In addition, for customers that have been shut off as a result of our Public Safety power shutoff, they will not be billed for the time that they are out of service. So we have suppressed billing. We are not doing estimated billing. Those customers will not be charged for the time that they are out of service. In addition to that, as i stated, our Contact Centers are available 24 hours a day for customers that are this event, the wait times today to access the Customer Service agents has been 30 seconds. So weve prioritized those calls. Theyre at the front of the queue with our emergency calls, and theyre able to reach our employees. As i said, theyve also been able to reach us through the website throughout the day. This is not this is a difficult day to be the chief customer officer for this company, and to know that we failed our customers with our inability to communicate. Having our Communication Channels become fragile and unstable at times is certainly the worst possible scenario, and i will only tell you that our team, we accept it. We own it. We will do better. And assure that we can provide the appropriate communication for our customers. So id like to thank our customers, thank our communities, thank our business communities. We have been in close and constant communication with our residential customers as well as our business customers, providing them with updates and ensuring they have the necessary information so that they can prepare to be restored, prepare to receive service, and prepare to continue on with their daily activities. So we appreciate our customers. We appreciate the feedback. We own our communication and you have my personal commitment that we will do better. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Im going to invite sumeet and bill back up, and well proceed to use the microphone. Dans got a question over here. Well start with dan. Right here beside you, dan. So, bill, i appreciate your time. You know, the governor just in the past hour said that this is a story about greed, mismanagement, and neglect over the course of decades. He says that pg e chose not to upgrade their power grid, basically saying that you made a choice of profits over safety. Your response . So im not going to deflect your question. I didnt come here to deal with the past. I came here to help improve the future. I havent delved into all those matters. I might have some slight disagreement with the governor if i did, but im looking forward, and im just trying to make this better. Another question. Are you doing enough to make these microgrids . Because was this blackout really necessary in such a wide level . Couldnt you have really targeted the high fire threat areas . Thats in fact what we did. We targeted the high fire threat areas. We started with a bigger foot. Actually, in the last several of these events, we targeted them, scoped them down the closer we got. Our ability to do that is much enhanced over where we were a year ago or six months ago. This was a widespread event, and it affected a lot of transmission lines. And once you affect transmission lines, youre in for a wider event. Now, we have to get better at this. We have to get more surgical. Weve gotten more surgical than we were,ut we did everything we could here to reduce the scope of this. The pundits are saying this is looking like upwards of 2. 6 billion in terms of a loss for our economy. Do you really expect us to suffer this again and again and again . Whats the answer to end these blackouts . What the value of human life would be my response. As i said when i concluded, thats why im here, to try and make this better. Now, we can work, and we need to work. We cannot live in this society where this happens frequently. And over time, we will make greater progress, system hardening, different equipment on the transmission lines, sectionalizers, enhanced vegetation management. Its going to take a little time. And my last question. I appreciate your time. And my last question, a question of optics. Over the past year, pg e tried to get 11 million in bonuses fr the top executives, when youre bankrupt. How do you explain that to the customers . First of all, those are not bonuses. Those are incentive payments that require you to hit certain performance goals that have improved the performance of the organization. Almost every utility in the country has this, but they werent granted by the bankruptcy court. So it turns out to be a moot question. Appearances but your bankrupt were coming over here. Thanks. Could youd weve been listening in to this pg e News Conference with the ceo of pg e, bill johnson there you see on the left. He said they had to make a choice between safety and hardship. They chose safety, and he says they made the right call. He does defend the decision, and there has been a lot of criticism today from Governor Newsom as you gathered from our reporter dan noyes. This is what he asked pg e about during this News Conference. Governor gavin newsom was highly critical of pg e, saying the Utility Company failed to modernize its grid over the years, leading us to these widespread Power Outages. This is not from my persp