PG&E powerhouse fixed at Nevada County lake as California wildfires delay South Yuba Pipe repairs

NEVADA COUNTY — After a series of setbacks, a powerhouse is back online near Lake Spaulding and water is flowing to agencies in Nevada and Placer counties after emergency repairs finished two days early.

People have been asked to voluntarily conserve water for months during two emergency repair projects. Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) spokesman Paul Moreno said crews have been working around the clock since they realized there was an issue.

“From the moment we discovered damage at the powerhouse, we made it a priority,” Moreno said.

PG&E said that with the early completion of emergency repairs, partial service was restored near Lake Spaulding.

Repairs on the South Yuba Pipe are going to take longer than expected. Earlier this month, PG&E announced that California’s active fire season was the reason behind another delay in construction. The end-of-August completion date for the pipe repairs is now mid-September. The pipe was initially damaged in February by a rockslide.

“With winter conditions and snow, we couldn’t even get in to carefully assess that situation, let alone start clearing the debris until well into the springtime,” Moreno said. “As soon as we could, we mobilized and began working to make repairs to that South Yuba Pipe.”

Moreno said everything was going smoothly until the special heavy-lifting helicopters they reserve to remove debris were pulled out of rotation by the Forest Service for firefighting purposes.

“There’s not a lot of these helicopters, and there’s not a lot of pilots that are trained to handle these helicopters,” Moreno said.

For residents like Juan Thomas who live in the impacted areas, he said individual homes aren’t seeing drastic shortages yet.

“The people who are really suffering from this are the people downstream from us, the agricultural users who use the raw water for agriculture,” Thomas said.

The Nevada Irrigation District released a graph showing the dramatic drop in water levels to areas like Rollins Lake. While water is flowing again thanks to finished repairs to the Spaulding 1 powerhouse, people who live in the area say they’ve never seen water levels so low.