Preparing Pets for a Public Safety Power Shutoff: Four Documents, Three Different Countdowns, and Which One Is Yours

Warning before a Public Safety Power Shutoff depends on your utility, and every utility that publishes a timeline also says the warning may be short or may not come. So get every pet contained and the carriers out before any notice arrives, then write your own utility’s published timeline on the card below.

The countdown is published, by the company that will turn your power off. The trouble is that four documents publish only three different ladders. The fourth, a statewide site that PG&E, SDG&E and SCE all point customers to, reprints one of the three. And not one of the four tells you what to do about an animal on any rung. This page gives no single number, because a single number would be wrong for most readers.

Which company bills you decides which countdown you have

A Public Safety Power Shutoff, or PSPS, is a utility deliberately turning off power to reduce the chance its own equipment starts a wildfire in dangerous weather. The California Public Utilities Commission says that in 2012 it ruled that Public Utilities Code Sections 451 and 399.2(a) give the electric investor-owned utilities authority to shut off power to protect public safety. It lists six companies: San Diego Gas & Electric, Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, Liberty Utilities, Bear Valley Electric Service and PacifiCorp. Liberty, Bear Valley and Pacific Power link out from the joint preparedness site to their own pages, so if one of them serves you, read that company’s page rather than the big three’s.

It is not only a California program. Pacific Power, PacifiCorp’s brand across Oregon, Washington and California, publishes its own shutoff timeline. Xcel Energy has executed one in Colorado. Its release on a Boulder and Jefferson County event says about 12,000 customers were impacted, about 40% fewer than anticipated, because the company delayed de-energization as it watched severe weather in real time. Its newsroom page carries conflicting dates, so none is given here for the event.

The ladders, side by side

SCE publishes the longest customer lead time of any of them. It says that when conditions may lead to a shutoff, “we begin sending notifications up to three days in advance.” On the same page it adds that because forecasts can change, the timing of notifications and the areas affected may change. Up to three days, and subject to change: both halves are the promise.

As of August 15, 2026, the utilities’ own pages published the following.

Source	Longest customer rung	Middle rungs	Last rung before the lights go	Stated caveat
SCE, PSPS page	3 days ahead (a 4 to 7 days ahead band above it is predictive modeling and a weather dashboard, not a customer notification)	2 days ahead; 1 day ahead	1 to 4 hours before shutoff	There might be little to no notice
SDG&E, PSPS more-info page	About 48 hours (a process row says customer notification starts 2 days ahead)	About 24 hours; about 12 hours	About 1 to 4 hours	Whole timeline is headed “when possible”
PG&E, customer guide	PSPS Watch, 48 to 24 hours before (the fact sheet states a goal of one to two days)	Not addressed as separate rungs; two stages ahead of the shutoff	PSPS Warning, 4 to 1 hours before	Timeline is headed “Forecast permitting”; the first alert may come the same day
prepareforpowerdown.com, the joint PG&E, SCE and SDG&E site	About 48 hours	About 24 hours; about 12 hours	1 to 4 hours	Headed “when possible”
Pacific Power (Oregon, Washington, California)	Customers typically receive 48 hours’ advance notice; a 3 to 7 days band is monitoring, and first customer notification is up to 2 days before	1 day before	Not addressed as an hours-before rung	Worsening conditions may require swift action

Read across: SCE households have a three-day rung, SDG&E households a twelve-hour rung SCE does not publish, and PG&E households neither, only a Watch that can begin as late as 24 hours out and a Warning that can arrive one hour before the power goes.

The joint site publishes one ladder of roughly 48, 24, 12 and 1 to 4 hours. That matches SDG&E exactly. It does not match SCE or PG&E. The site’s footer describes it as a partnership between PG&E, SDG&E and SCE, funded by California utility customers under the auspices of the CPUC. So a PG&E customer sent to a preparedness site their utility co-owns sees a twelve-hour rung PG&E does not publish.

Nobody is being careless; three operators agreed on a joint front door. But it has a consequence, and this conclusion is ours, not any document’s: the preparedness page you read and the utility that will shut you off may be running different clocks, so treat only the rung your own utility publishes as reliable, and treat a plan as finished only when it survives the shortest rung on your own utility’s list.

PG&E’s four forecast states

PG&E’s customer guide names four states, and the alert you receive will use them: no PSPS forecast; PSPS Risk Elevated, with shutoffs possible; PSPS Watch, with shutoffs likely; and PSPS Warning, with shutoffs required. Watch and Warning here are PG&E’s own terms, not National Weather Service products, and a household that knows storm vocabulary can read one as the other. On PG&E’s schedule a Watch is the 48-to-24-hour stage and a Warning is the 4-to-1-hour stage, so a Warning is not a planning notice. It is a start-executing notice.

The 72-hour number is real, and it is not addressed to you

This is the likeliest way a well-meaning plan goes wrong. PG&E’s customer guide says: “These notifications are shared with public safety partners, critical facilities and transmission-level customers and are sent 48-72 hours before a potential PSPS.” A residential household is none of those three. The same guide’s customer timeline is the 48-to-24-hour Watch and the 4-to-1-hour Warning.

A different company in different states publishes the same split. Pacific Power says its goal is to alert public safety partners approximately 72 hours in advance and, with those partners, to begin alerting customers: “Customers will typically receive 48 hours’ advance notice of a Public Safety Power Shutoff.” The long lead time goes to the institutions that stage crews, open shelters and move people, and the household gets the shorter one. The mistake to avoid is reading a partner’s figure as your own.

Pacific Power adds a line that defeats the natural check on whether this concerns you: some customers outside Public Safety Power Shutoff areas could be impacted because of the interconnected nature of the electrical system. Finding your address outside the shaded map is not the same as being unaffected.

Every operator publishes an escape hatch, and one opened this year

Four documents, three ladders, and one point of agreement: none of it is guaranteed.

PG&E says it will always do its best to alert you by email, phone call or text. It also warns that weather forecasts can change, and that “in some cases we may not send the first alert until the same day your power is shut off”. SCE says its advance forecasts might not capture the real-time onset of strong winds or other dangerous fire conditions, and that “there might be little to no notice before power is shut off for PSPS”. SDG&E and prepareforpowerdown.com both caption their whole timeline “when possible”. Pacific Power leads with “Whenever possible”.

The July 15, 2026 shutoff, as the operator described it to its regulator

The CPUC says that in 2018 it adopted Resolution ESRB-8 to strengthen customer notification requirements before de-energization events, and required utilities to report within 10 days after each one.

PG&E’s report on the July 15, 2026 de-energization, filed July 30, 2026, describes a fast-onset event. It says rapidly shifting weather set the initial scope after the 48 to 72 hour priority notification window had passed. The report states: “Priority Notifications were not sent to Public Safety Partners within 48 – 72 hours prior to anticipated de-energization, in accordance with Phase 1 Guidelines.” PG&E began notifying partners and customers in the anticipated areas on Tuesday, July 14, and made the decision to de-energize at 12:30 PDT on July 15. That is roughly one day of customer notice, not three, and the partner tier that is supposed to get the longest warning did not get it either.

The report’s summary counts 7,790 customers notified, 5,186 de-energized and 2,618 canceled, with 151 Medical Baseline customers de-energized across eight counties. A footnote says 16 of the de-energized customers did not receive any notification of the planned de-energization. The report’s notification-failure table is about institutions, not households. It records 89 public safety partner entities that did not receive the 48-to-72-hour priority notification, 4 that missed the 24-to-48-hour notice, 4 that missed the 1-to-4-hour notice, and 3 that received no notification before de-energization. It records 180 critical facilities that missed the 48-to-72-hour notification. The tier with the longest published lead time is the tier this report records missing it most.

The canceled count points the other way, and matters as much. A notification is not a schedule. It is a possibility that may be withdrawn, so your plan has to be one you are willing to run several times a season for events that never happen.

The timeline is a “should,” not a “shall”

PG&E’s report describes the Commission’s guidelines as “not a strict liability standard” and says they state that utilities “should, whenever possible, adhere to the following minimum notification timeline”. It also says the Commission, under Resolution ESRB-8, has said it is not practicable to require advance notification in every case. This is PG&E’s account of the Commission’s language, so this page states no Commission-mandated hour figure. The Commission says it established the PSPS Citation Program in September 2023. Enforcement is a reason to expect improvement, not a reason to plan around the long rung.

What the utilities publish about pets

The utilities publish pet material, but none of it is attached to a clock.

• SDG&E publishes a two-page Pet Disaster Checklist, document code S2650010 0226, credited on its own face to cdc.gov. It covers documents (veterinary records, rabies certificate, vaccinations, prescriptions, plus recent heartworm test results for dogs and FeLV/FIV test results for cats), fill-in fields for the microchip number and the chip company’s name and number, a two-week supply of food, water and medication with instructions, a one-month supply of flea, tick and heartworm preventative, and basic supplies: leash, collar with ID, harness, a carrier with bedding, a pet first aid book and kit, and litter for cats.
• SCE, in its PSPS preparedness answer, tells customers: “Be sure to add special needs items for loved ones, including pets.”
• PG&E’s outage-center page carries the tip “Have an emergency plan in place, including pets”. It is not in the 39-page customer guide, whose text does not mention pets, animals or evacuation.
• The joint site opens its What You Can Do Now list with “Have a personal safety plan in place for every member of your household (including pets).” Its checklist page has a Pet or Service Animal Safety heading and links out to four resources: a ready.gov pet or service animal safety fact sheet, a Red Cross pets and disaster safety checklist, County of San Diego pet preparedness, and a US FDA pet emergency preparedness kit page.
• Cal OES published the same personal-safety-plan sentence in its August 16, 2021 release about a planned shutoff.

Every one of those is a kit list or a reminder that a plan should exist. None of the utility, CPUC or Cal OES pages cited here gives an instruction of the form “at this many hours before the shutoff, do this with your animal.” If your utility publishes one, its version outranks ours.

SDG&E’s checklist has an English page and a Spanish page, and they are not word for word (the Spanish lists treats, a scoop and waste bags). A bilingual household should keep both.

The card, built from the bottom up

Countdown cards are usually written top down. For a PSPS that is the wrong order, because the top rungs may not exist for you: PG&E may not alert you until the day of, SCE may give little to no notice, and the July 2026 event compressed a three-day architecture into about a day. So this card is built from the bottom. The last rung has to be survivable standing alone, and everything above it is bonus time.

The pet actions here are ours: no operator we cite assigns a pet action to a rung, so the assignment of task to rung is this site’s own construction from what the sources say about timing and about what a shutoff does to a house. Use the rungs your utility publishes and ignore the ones it does not.

Rung zero: no notice at all, or the power is already off

If the power is already off and you did nothing beforehand, account for every animal, contain the ones that will hide, and find out whether this is a shutoff or an ordinary outage, because the two have different durations and endings. Your utility’s outage map is the fastest answer. SCE says that after a shutoff customers can check the Outage Map to confirm it is due to PSPS.

Water depends on where yours comes from. On municipal water, fill containers now while the tap still runs. On a private well the pump died with the power, and drawing what is left in the system is contested rather than recommended; our page on an electric well pump and pet water sets out the disagreement between published sources. On a well with the power off, the answer is stored water, not the faucet.

Then read the hazard, not the outage. A shutoff happens in fire weather. If your county or fire authority has issued any evacuation instruction, that instruction governs and this card does not.

Rung one: one to four hours

Every one of the four ladders has this rung. It is the last notification any of them promises. SCE says what it means: “After this notice, power shutoffs may occur at any time during the PSPS event.” Treat it as now. Do these in order:

1. Every animal indoors, contained and physically located. This is first because it is the only task on the card that can fail permanently. A cat that goes under a deck at hour zero is not retrievable with a flashlight and a power station. Cats into one closed room. Dogs in. Outdoor and free-roaming animals in.
2. Carriers out and open. Not packed or loaded, just out where you can reach them without a light. The same action serves an evacuation if the weather turns.
3. Water into containers. Fill what you have while the taps still work. On a private well this is not optional and not a later task: the pump stops when the power does. Our outage hub covers what the pressure tank does and does not give you.
4. Charge everything. Phones, battery banks, the power station, and any battery air pump or powered device an animal depends on.
5. Consolidate medication and cold-chain items in one place so a single decision covers them. Our page on pet medication and refrigeration during an outage works out that decision. Ask your veterinarian what a missed or warmed medication means for your animal.
6. Make the stay-or-go call while the phone still works. Boarding, a friend, a hotel that takes animals. Calling during an outage is much harder than calling before one.

Rung two: about twelve hours

Only SDG&E and the joint site publish a twelve-hour rung. If your utility does not, move this rung’s contents up into your one-to-four-hour block.

• Pre-cool or pre-heat the rooms the animals will occupy.
• Freeze water bottles and any gel packs while the freezer is still running.
• Decide which single room the household and animals will live in, and move bedding, litter and bowls into it now. Our species-by-species look at how fast an indoor temperature decays tells you which room and how much margin you have.
• Refill any prescriptions that are due, and confirm you have the medication instructions as well as the medication. SDG&E’s pet checklist lists them as two separate lines.
• Top off the vehicle’s fuel and charge. Pumps and chargers are on the same grid you are about to lose.

Rung three: about a day

Every utility in the table publishes something here: PG&E’s fact sheet goal of one to two days, SDG&E’s and the joint site’s 24-hour rung, SCE’s one-day rung, and Pacific Power’s one day before.

• Test your backup power against the actual devices, not the box. Our pet load power budget worksheet is where to do the arithmetic.
• Get cash out. Card readers are on the grid too.
• Wash and refill everything that holds water, including the fountain reservoir, and put a manual dish in place, because a pump-driven fountain is an empty bowl once the power stops.
• Count food and litter against the length you are planning for. SDG&E’s checklist sets a two-week bar for food and water per animal, which is longer than most shutoffs and a reasonable target anyway.
• Photograph each animal today on the phone you will have with you. A current photo is what a lost-pet report runs on.

Rung four: about two days

• If you are going to leave, leave on this rung rather than the last one. A shutoff is not an evacuation, but leaving before an event is a different job from leaving during one. Our page on how early to leave with pets covers that decision.
• Confirm your destination has said yes to your animals, by species and by number, and that someone there will be awake when you arrive.
• Ask about refilling the prescriptions you will need for the length of the outage plus a margin, and keep the medication instructions with them. Emergency-refill provisions are conditional, tied to triggers that are not on any utility’s clock, and written about people rather than animals (see our storm countdown card). The buffer that reliably exists is the one you built months earlier, which our pet medication refill calculator puts a date on.
• Check on the neighbor who has animals and cannot lift them, cannot drive, or does not read the utility’s notification language. No utility program registers animals, as the next section explains.

SCE is the only utility of the four that publishes a three-day customer rung. For most readers everything at three days and beyond is the quiet afternoon.

The registry that exists for people, and the one that does not exist for animals

PG&E runs two tiers. It offers extra PSPS alerts to people who rely on power for health and safety, and says this may include alerting you in person. The first tier is the Medical Baseline Program, for those who depend on power for certain medical needs. The second is Vulnerable Customer Status, which you can self-certify for if you are not eligible for Medical Baseline. The customer guide calls it Self-Identified Vulnerable, for customers with a serious illness or condition that could become life-threatening if electric service is disconnected, and adds a requirement people miss: the status stays on the account for one year, and customers must renew each year.

What enrollment buys is persistence. The guide says PG&E will continue hourly attempts to notify you if you do not respond, and may try to contact you in person; if it rings your doorbell during a life-threatening emergency, it says it will help you call 911, and if you are not home it will leave a doorhanger. PG&E’s report on the July 2026 event describes hourly retries until the customer confirmed receipt.

SCE says it will attempt to reach customers enrolled in its Medical Baseline Allowance program by their preferred contact method, email, text or voice call. If it cannot reach them directly, it says it will send a technician to the door. Its Critical Care Backup Battery program offers free portable backup batteries for medical devices. SDG&E starts notifying customers at two days ahead, including critical facilities and medical baseline customers, along with state, county and city government agencies.

Every one of those programs is defined by a human medical need. No utility or agency page cited here describes a program that registers an animal’s dependence on electricity, or says an animal’s needs affect notification, restoration priority or equipment eligibility. A smaller operator may publish something not covered here.

What to do with that is our reasoning, not any utility’s instruction: if anyone in your household qualifies for a medical baseline or vulnerable-customer program on their own medical grounds, enrolling is the highest-leverage administrative act available, because it converts the household from an automated message into hourly calls and eventually a person at the door. The animals do not qualify. The household can, and the notification reaches the whole house. Whether a person qualifies is a question for the utility, and what an animal can tolerate without power is a question for your veterinarian.

One support route is not utility-specific. PG&E’s fact sheet directs customers to 211 California, by dialing 211 or texting PREPARE to 211-211, and says a care coordinator can help you connect to local hotel options and car rides, secure food replacement, and get referred to health and safety programs and backup power. SCE names the same route. Our page on using 2-1-1 to find pet help covers what it can and cannot do for an animal household.

A Community Resource Center is not a plan for an animal

All three big California utilities open centers during a shutoff. They are useful for charging a phone, filling a jug and finding out what is happening. They are not a place to take a dog, and the published descriptions are the reason to say so before you drive.

• PG&E’s guide lists device charging, Wi-Fi, bottled water, snacks, tables and chairs, ADA-accessible restrooms, bagged ice at indoor centers, blankets, and air conditioning or heating at indoor centers. No pet or animal provision appears. The decisive fact is the hours: “The standard center operating hours are from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.” A household that cannot leave an animal alone overnight cannot solve the night with a center that closes at ten. PG&E’s outage-center page says it opens drop-in centers during the day, and is the one document here that says whether an animal may come in: “Service animals are welcome at Community Resource Centers.” It links to the Department of Justice’s service-animal guidance rather than setting its own rule.
• SDG&E says its centers are equipped with water, Wi-Fi, snacks, ice and device charging stations. No animal provision appears.
• SCE publishes the longest list: updated outage information, PSPS alert enrollment support, mobile and portable medical device charging, restrooms, Wi-Fi, water, light snacks, ice and insulated cold bags for medications, and resiliency kits. It also says it offers in-language support and accommodates customers with disabilities or other access and functional needs, including wheelchairs, privacy screens, sensory kits and food supplies for service animals.

Read the scope of that last item carefully. It sits inside a sentence about customers with disabilities or other access and functional needs, and the words are service animals. A service animal is a working animal under a legal definition. A household pet is not one, and the difference matters when you are standing at a door with a carrier. Our page on pets at cooling and warming centers works through it, including the federal regulation behind it and who decides at the door. SCE’s dedicated centers page describes what a center provides without the service-animal line, so the answer you get depends on which SCE page you open.

The two halves of the answer point in opposite directions. If you handle a service animal, PG&E says outright it is welcome, SCE’s PSPS page says its centers stock food for one, and access is governed by federal disability law rather than a utility’s preference. If you have a household pet, none of the center descriptions across all three utilities says a pet may enter, and none says one may not. That silence is neither permission nor refusal. It is a question to ask the specific site. SCE adds that center locations are usually posted up to a day before a potential PSPS.

PG&E’s July 2026 report says five centers opened and served 2,494 visitors, of whom 2,438 did not remain on site. Visitors were given bags with a PSPS information card, water, non-perishable snacks, a mobile battery charger and a blanket. On that event, most people treated a center as a supply stop. That is a fact about one event, not a rule, but it fits the published hours and resource lists. Our conclusion from putting them together: plan a Community Resource Center as a resupply and information stop you visit without your animals, and plan your actual shelter somewhere that has agreed in advance to take them. Never leave an animal in a parked vehicle while you go inside to ask.

Why the lights do not come back when the wind stops

Most pet planning stops at the moment the power goes off. For a shutoff, what happens after the weather improves decides how long you have to cover.

SDG&E publishes the sequence most clearly. It says crews first need to record reduced wind speeds for a sustained period, then allow 4 to 8 hours of daylight to patrol the line. Some circuits in rural, mountainous areas need a helicopter, which can fly only when winds are below 35 mph, and “for safety reasons, our crews cannot patrol at night.” If there is damage to lines or poles, repairs must come before power can be restored, and that step has no fixed duration. If the wind drops at eight in the evening, the patrol does not start until morning, and the four-to-eight-hour window starts from there. A shutoff that could have ended overnight ends the next afternoon.

SCE says inspections typically take up to eight hours but may take longer if daylight is required for ground or aerial patrols by helicopter or drone. PG&E publishes a goal rather than a mechanism: to restore power within 24 hours after severe weather has passed.

On the July 2026 event PG&E reported meeting that goal: 100% of customers restored within 24 hours of the all-clear, with an average restoration time of approximately 3.6 hours. That is one event with no damage found, the easy case. SDG&E says that in the case of fire or other adverse weather, restoration can take days. SCE says plainly: “PSPS events may last over 24 hours.” The joint site says outages could last several hours or multiple days.

SDG&E also heads off a panic at hour eighteen: you may see lights on in your vicinity while your location stays dark, because different parts of a neighborhood may be on different circuits, and not all circuits can be restored at the same time. A neighbor’s porch light is not evidence your outage is over.

The planning consequence is our own conclusion from the operators’ constraints: size the animals’ supplies and the room’s thermal plan for at least one full overnight past the moment the wind stops, because on the published sequence a nightfall between the all-clear and the patrol adds a day.

The branch: when the same weather turns into an evacuation

A shutoff is a fire-weather event, and the operators say so themselves. PG&E’s PSPS page lists Red Flag Warnings from the National Weather Service among what it considers when planning a shutoff. Its customer guide names the same criterion and defines the term as a warning issued by the National Weather Service indicating current or expected red flag conditions, generally within the next 12 to 24 hours. The joint site lists a red flag warning declared by the National Weather Service among the conditions that could lead to a shutoff.

California’s emergency management agency has described the pairing. In an August 16, 2021 release about a planned shutoff across more than a dozen counties, Cal OES said it was coordinating with firefighters and investor-owned utilities to prepare for the “dual threats of new wildfires and utility-initiated power shutoffs.” The same release says the state has no role in the utilities’ decision to shut off power. That is a 2021 statement about a 2021 event, not current guidance.

None of those pages tells a pet owner what to do differently because a shutoff and a fire might arrive together. SDG&E’s Pet Disaster Checklist has no mention of a shutoff and no notification timing.

Our conclusion, as our own reasoning: do the actions that serve both branches first and the actions that serve only one last. Containment serves both, because a contained animal can be carried out or kept in a cool room. Carriers out and open serves both. Documents and medication in one container serves both. Filling every water container serves the shutoff branch and costs nothing on the evacuation branch. Running an extension cord to a tank pump, rearranging a room around a battery, or setting up a generator serves only the stay-home branch and is work you may have to abandon, so do it after the portable work.

The trigger for the branch is not your utility. An evacuation instruction comes from your county, your sheriff or your fire authority, and it outranks anything on this page. To read the levels those agencies use, open our page on evacuation levels decoded for pet owners.

Your PSPS pet checklist

Print this and put it where the carriers live.

• Find out which utility serves you, and write its own notification rungs into the card, crossing out the ones it does not publish. A twelve-hour rung is real in San Diego and does not exist in PG&E’s published timeline.
• Sign up for alerts, and check that the contact details on the account are ones you actually answer. PG&E says account holders receive PSPS alerts automatically and also offers address alerts for other addresses that matter to you, such as where an animal is boarded or day-cared.
• Do not build the plan on 72 hours. At PG&E and Pacific Power that figure is addressed to public safety partners, critical facilities and transmission-level customers.
• Make the one-to-four-hour block survivable standing alone: animals indoors, contained and located first (the only task on the card that can fail permanently), then carriers out and open, which also serves an evacuation.
• Fill water containers before the pressure goes, and on a private well treat this as a hard requirement.
• If anyone in the household qualifies for a medical baseline or vulnerable-customer program on their own medical grounds, enroll, and renew it if your utility requires an annual renewal.
• Do not plan on a Community Resource Center for the animals. PG&E publishes hours of 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., and no center description cited here says a pet may enter. If you drive to a center for supplies, never leave an animal in a parked vehicle while you go inside to ask.
• Have a second destination that has already said yes to your animals, by species and by number, and a way to reach it that does not depend on a working card reader.
• Size supplies for one full overnight past the wind dropping. Patrol needs daylight, and on SDG&E’s system helicopters need winds below 35 mph.
• Keep the fire branch open. A red flag warning is one of the published criteria for a shutoff, so the same notification may end in an evacuation order from your county, which outranks everything here.
• Photograph every animal now, and put the microchip number, the chip company’s name and the chip company’s number somewhere that does not need power to read.
• Ask your veterinarian, before any of this is live, what your specific animals can tolerate without climate control and what a missed or warmed medication means for them. This page can name the clocks. Only your vet knows the animal.

The version you do on a quiet afternoon

None of these can be done at the one-to-four-hour rung, and all of them make that rung short. (Settling which utility serves you, and what it publishes, comes first and is the closing step below.)

Settle the destination question with a phone call. The most useful thing you can own before a shutoff is a specific person at a specific address saying yes, to every animal you have, any night this season. A destination you assume is not a destination. Our pages on boarding versus evacuating together and on what to do when your county has no pet-friendly shelter cover the version of this call where the first answer is no.

Settle the power question with arithmetic rather than a purchase. Which of your animals’ devices need electricity, for how long, and whether the battery you own covers it, is a calculation you want on paper before an alert. Our pet load power budget worksheet walks it. If the answer is that you need hardware, our comparisons of portable power stations for pet loads and of a quiet generator against a power station are where that decision belongs. If it involves a generator, read our page on generators and carbon monoxide around pets before you run one, along with our list of the outage improvisations that endanger animals.

Settle the containment question with a rehearsal. Time yourself getting every animal into a closed room or a carrier, at night, with a flashlight. That number is the only figure on this page that describes your household, and every published rung is only useful if it is longer than the number you measured.

Where to go next

This page is the scheduled-shutoff spoke of our pets and power outages hub, which sets out the four different outage clocks. This one runs on the shutoff clock, and it stops at the moment the power goes off.

If the power is already off and nobody warned you, the outage hub is written for that case, including the four household dependencies that genuinely need backup power and the three that do not.

If the notice you got is a grid alert rather than a utility shutoff, it comes from a different sender. A PSPS is your own utility de-energizing its lines because of fire-weather risk; a grid alert comes from the regional grid operator (ERCOT, CAISO, PJM or MISO) because reserves are running short. Our grid alert stages and pet power needs guide covers that separate ladder.

If you want the same card shape for a storm, our T-minus storm countdown card is the sibling to this page. If you are deciding when to leave rather than how to stay, how early to leave with pets and evacuation levels decoded for pet owners cover the departure side.

Then do the one thing that pays off most, in about five minutes. Open your electricity bill, find the company’s name, open that company’s own PSPS page, and write down the actual hours it publishes. Not the hours on a preparedness site, and not the hours in an article. The hours from the company that will be turning your power off.