Tree contact knocks out power for hundreds in Southern Humboldt

A tree contact with a power line knocked out electricity to 557 PG&E customers in the Miranda and Southern Humboldt area at 10:42 p.m. Thursday, June 25, forcing crews to work through the night on a problem that was first projected to last until Friday morning.

PG&E initially estimated restoration by 7:15 a.m. Friday, June 26, while it evaluated the damaged section and made repairs needed to safely bring service back online. Lost Coast Outpost’s outage tracker showed power restored by 12:22 a.m., cutting the outage to about 1 hour and 40 minutes. The tracker also recorded the cause as tree contact and showed the customer count later falling to 505 before service returned.

The outage was another reminder of how easily wooded parts of Humboldt County can lose power when vegetation and overhead lines collide. PG&E says trees contacting powerlines can cause both outages and wildfires, and its vegetation-management work includes routine inspections plus pruning or removal near power lines. Humboldt County’s emergency preparedness pages also list power outages as a local hazard, underscoring how common the risk is in a county where distance, terrain and aging overhead infrastructure can make restoration harder overnight.

That risk lands hard in Southern Humboldt, where dark roads, scattered homes and spotty cell service can turn a short outage into a safety problem. Residents are urged to use flashlights instead of candles, stay at least 25 feet from any downed line, and call 911 if a wire is on the ground. PG&E says all fallen lines should be treated as live, and Humboldt County officials advise people to check on neighbors who may need help during an outage, especially households that rely on electricity for medical equipment, refrigeration or cooling.

The June 25 outage also fit a broader pattern of disruption in the region. The same day, a separate PG&E outage in the Eel River Valley left more than 10,000 customers without power. In Southern Humboldt, a January 2026 outage peaked at 1,021 customers after a tree branch fell into a PG&E line, showing that tree-related failures have hit the area before and are not limited to one storm or one night.

PG&E says customers who are enrolled in outage alerts can get text, email or phone updates, and its 24-hour outage information line is 1-800-PGE-5002. For rural communities across Southern Humboldt, the immediate question after each outage is not just when the lights will come back on, but how many more times the same corridor of lines, trees and weather will fail before the risk is reduced.