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

When we built our printable storm countdown card, the hardest part was that the clock had to be assembled. The federal pages a household would check publish actions without hours, and the hour figures that do exist belong to individual states and counties, so the card had to say so on its own face.

A Public Safety Power Shutoff is the opposite problem, and that inversion is why this page exists. The countdown is published. It is published by the company that will actually turn your power off, in writing, on a page you can open right now. The trouble is that there are four such documents, that between them they publish only three different ladders, that the fourth is the statewide site all three of the big California utilities point their customers toward and it simply reprints one of the three, and that not one of the four, on any rung, tells you what to do about an animal.

This page fixes the second problem and is honest about the first. It will not give you a single number, because a single number would be wrong for most of the people reading it.

Which Company Bills You Decides Which Countdown You Have

Start here, before any of the rest of it makes sense.

A Public Safety Power Shutoff, usually shortened to 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 describes the legal basis on its own PSPS page: “In 2012, the CPUC ruled that California Public Utilities Code Sections 451 and 399.2(a) give the electric IOUs authority to shut off the electric power to protect public safety.” The same sentence continues with the roster, and the roster is longer than most coverage suggests: “This allows the electric IOUs (San Diego Gas & Electric, Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, Liberty Utilities, Bear Valley Electric Service, and PacifiCorp) to shut off power to prevent catastrophic wildfires when strong winds, heat events, and related conditions are present.”

Six companies, not three. Liberty Utilities, Bear Valley Electric Service and PacifiCorp serve mountain and rural communities where a household with animals, a well pump and a long driveway is not an edge case, it is the typical customer. The joint preparedness site the big three run lists a PSPS preparedness entry for all six in its own menu, but only three of those are pages on the site itself. Bear Valley, Liberty and Pacific Power sit under a heading reading Other Utilities and are outbound links to those companies’ own pages, which is a fair description of how much of the published preparedness material is written for you if you are one of their customers.

It is also not only a California program. Pacific Power, which is PacifiCorp’s brand across Oregon, Washington and California, publishes a full shutoff program with its own timeline. Xcel Energy has executed one in Colorado: its newsroom release on a Boulder and Jefferson County event states that “Approximately 12,000 customers in Boulder and Jefferson Counties were impacted by the PSPS, about 40% less than were anticipated to be a part of the safety measure”, and that the company “was able to limit the impact as it delayed de-energization as the company observed severe weather conditions in real time.” We are not putting a date on that event, because the page contradicts itself about the year: the dateline on the body reads March 14, 2025 while the page’s own published-date metadata reads 2026-03-15 and the URL is built on the later date. The event is documented. The date is not settled by that document, so we are not going to settle it for you.

The four ladders, side by side

Before the table, one sentence to show how carefully these documents are worded even at their most generous. Southern California Edison, which publishes the longest customer lead time of any of them, states: “SCE monitors weather and fire risk conditions continuously. When conditions may lead to a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS), we begin sending notifications up to three days in advance.” The sentence immediately after that one, on the same page, is the qualifier: “Because forecasts can change, the timing of notifications and the areas affected may also change.” Up to three days, and subject to change. Both halves are the promise.

Every cell below is what that source’s own page or document states, read on August 15, 2026. Where a source does not publish something, the cell says not addressed rather than borrowing an answer from the row above it. The first four rows are the documents a California household is most likely to read. The fifth is a different company operating in different states, included because it independently reproduces a split the next section is about.

Source (read 2026-08-15)	Longest customer rung published	Middle rungs	Last rung before the lights go	Stated caveat
Southern California Edison, PSPS page	“3 Days Ahead Notification”; a “4-7 Days Ahead” band above it is described as predictive modeling and a weather dashboard rather than a customer notification	“2 Days Ahead Notification”; “1 Day Ahead Notification”	“1-4 Hours Before Shutoff Notification”	“there might be little to no notice before power is shut off for PSPS”
San Diego Gas & Electric, PSPS more-info page	“~ 48 hours before power is turned off”; a separate process row states customer notification starts “2 days ahead”	“24 hours before power is turned off“; “ 12 hours before power is turned off”	“~ 1-4 hours before power is turned off”	whole timeline is headed “Timeline of Notifications (when possible)”
PG&E, Your guide to Public Safety Power Shutoffs	“PSPS Watch 48-24 hours before power is turned off”; the fact sheet states “Our goal is to notify you one to two days before a PSPS”	not addressed as separate rungs; the notification timeline names two stages ahead of the shutoff	“PSPS Warning 4-1 hours before power is turned off”	timeline is headed “Forecast permitting”; the PSPS page adds “in some cases we may not send the first alert until the same day your power is shut off”
prepareforpowerdown.com, the joint PG&E, SCE and SDG&E site	“~48 hours before power is turned off”	“~24 hours before power is turned off”; “~12 hours before power is turned off”	“1-4 hours before power is turned off”	headed “Notifications (when possible)”
Pacific Power (Oregon, Washington, California)	“Customers will typically receive 48 hours’ advance notice of a Public Safety Power Shutoff”; a “3 to 7 days before” band is monitoring, and “Up to 2 days before” is when “Customers receive first notification”	“1 day before”	not addressed as an hours-before rung	“Although worsening conditions may require swift action”

Read the table across rather than down and the finding falls out on its own. A household in SCE territory has a three-day rung. A household in SDG&E territory has a twelve-hour rung that SCE does not publish. A household in PG&E territory has neither: it has a Watch stage that can begin as late as 24 hours out, and a Warning stage that can arrive one hour before the power goes.

And the joint site, prepareforpowerdown.com, publishes a single unified ladder of roughly 48, 24, 12 and 1 to 4 hours. That ladder matches SDG&E exactly. It does not match SCE, and it does not match PG&E. The site’s own footer describes what it is: “PrepareforPowerDown is a partnership between Pacific Gas and Electric Co (PG&E), San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E) and Southern California Edison (SCE) and is funded by California utility customers under the auspices of the California Public Utilities Commission.” So a customer of the largest utility in the state, sent to a preparedness site that utility co-owns, is shown a countdown with a twelve-hour rung their own utility does not publish and no three-day rung the neighboring utility does.

That is not a conspiracy and it is not evidence anyone is being careless. It is what happens when three operators with three weather problems, three service territories and three notification systems agree on a joint front door. But it has a consequence for a household with animals, and this next part is our conclusion from putting those four documents next to each other rather than something any of them states: the preparedness page you read and the utility that will shut you off may be running different clocks, so the only rung you should treat as reliable is the one your own utility publishes, and the only plan you should treat as finished is the one that survives the shortest rung on your own utility’s list.

The other names for the same thing

PG&E’s forecast has four named states, published in its customer guide, and the vocabulary is worth learning because the alert you receive will use it: “No Public Safety Power Shutoff: Conditions that generally call for a PSPS are not forecast at this time.” Then “PSPS Risk Elevated – Shutoffs Possible: Conditions are being monitored due to increased potential of a PSPS.” Then “PSPS Watch – Shutoffs Likely: PSPS is likely due to a combination of weather and dry fuel conditions.” Then “PSPS Warning – Shutoffs Required: PSPS is required given the latest forecast of weather, fuels and/or observed conditions.”

Watch and Warning here are PG&E’s own words for its own stages, not the National Weather Service’s watch and warning products, and a household that already knows the storm vocabulary can easily read one as the other. The important practical difference is the one in the timeline: on PG&E’s published 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 at all. It is a start-executing notice.

The 72-Hour Number Is Real, and at Two Utilities It Is Not Addressed to You

This is the single most likely way a well-meaning plan goes wrong, so it gets its own section.

Search any PSPS document set for the number 72 and you will find it. PG&E’s customer guide states: “Whenever possible, we issue priority PSPS notifications. These notifications are shared with public safety partners, critical facilities and transmission-level customers and are sent 48-72 hours before a potential PSPS.”

Read the middle of that sentence. Public safety partners. Critical facilities. Transmission-level customers. A residential household is none of the three. The same guide’s customer-facing timeline, on a different page of the same document, is the 48-to-24-hour Watch and the 4-to-1-hour Warning.

The reason to trust that this is a structural split rather than one company’s quirk is that a completely different company, in different states, publishes it independently. Pacific Power: “Whenever possible, we will provide advance notice of a Public Safety Power Shutoff. Although worsening conditions may require swift action, our goal is to alert public safety partners approximately 72 hours in advance, and, working in tandem with these local partners, to begin alerting customers. Customers will typically receive 48 hours’ advance notice of a Public Safety Power Shutoff.”

Two operators, two states, same architecture: the long lead time goes to the institutions that have to stage crews, open shelters and move people, and the household gets the shorter one. That is a defensible way to run a warning system. It is a disastrous thing to misread when you are the household.

Pacific Power publishes one more line worth carrying, because it defeats the most natural way to check whether this concerns you: “Some customers outside of Public Safety Power Shutoff areas could be impacted by a Public Safety Power Shutoff due to the interconnected nature of the electrical system.” Looking at a map and finding your address outside the shaded polygon is not the same as being unaffected.

Every Operator Publishes an Escape Hatch, and One of Them Opened This Year

Four documents, three different ladders, and one thing all of them agree on: none of it is guaranteed.

PG&E, on its PSPS page: “We will always do our best to alert you before a PSPS via email, phone call and/or text.” Then, in a note on the same page: “Weather forecasts can change. This could shift the shutoff timing or the number of affected customers. Because of this, in some cases we may not send the first alert until the same day your power is shut off.”

SCE, at the bottom of its notification ladder: “Our advance forecasts might not capture the real-time onset of strong winds or other dangerous fire conditions. In these cases, 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”.

Our outage hub already tells readers to treat a shutoff as a countdown you may get rather than a countdown you are owed. This page is where that sentence gets its evidence, because it is no longer a caution about a hypothetical.

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

The California Public Utilities Commission requires a report after each event. Its own page states: “In 2018, the CPUC adopted Resolution ESRB-8 to strengthen customer notification requirements before de-energization events and required utilities to submit a report within 10 days after each de-energization event.” Those reports are public, and they are where the ladder gets tested against reality.

PG&E’s report for the July 15, 2026 de-energization, filed July 30, 2026, describes a fast-onset event. In its own words: “Due to the rapidly shifting weather, the initial PSPS scope was established for de-energization after the (48 – 72hr) Priority Notification window had passed. As a result of the rapidly changing weather, Priority Notifications were not sent to Public Safety Partners within 48 – 72 hours prior to anticipated de-energization, in accordance with Phase 1 Guidelines.”

Then the customer timeline: “On Tuesday, July 14, we began notifying Public Safety Partners and customers in the areas anticipated to be impacted.” The decision itself came the next day: “on July 15 at 12:30 PDT, we made the decision to de-energize customers for safety”.

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 own summary table gives the counts. Total customers notified, 7,790. Total customers de-energized, 5,186. Total customers canceled, 2,618. Medical Baseline customers de-energized, 151. Eight counties. A footnote attached to the de-energized figure adds a detail no ladder prepares you for: “Of the customers de-energized, 16 customers did not receive any notifications regarding planned de-energization.”

The report also publishes a breakdown of notification failures by rung, using the labels of the Commission’s own guidelines. Read the row headings before the numbers, because this table is not about households: its two groups are Public Safety Partners and critical facilities and infrastructure, the same institutional tiers the 72-hour figure belongs to. Public safety partner entities who did not receive the 48-to-72-hour priority notification: 89, printed with an asterisk pointing to an explanation table. Entities who did not receive the 24-to-48-hour advance notification: 4. Entities who did not receive the 1-to-4-hour imminent notification: 4. Entities who did not receive any notifications before de-energization: 3. Critical facilities who did not receive the 48-to-72-hour priority notification: 180, also asterisked. So the tier with the longest published lead time is also the tier this report records missing it most.

There is a second reading of those numbers that matters just as much to a household with animals, and it points the other way. The report records 2,618 customers canceled. Those three counts do not sum, and the arithmetic that shows it is ours rather than the report’s: de-energized plus canceled comes to 7,804 against 7,790 notified, and the footnote about 16 de-energized customers who received no notification does not close that gap either. We are not going to reconcile the report’s categories for you, and the planning point stands on the canceled count alone. A notification is not a schedule. It is a possibility that may be withdrawn, which means the plan you build has to be one you are willing to execute several times a season for events that never happen. A plan you resent running is a plan you will eventually skip.

The Timeline Is a Should, Not a Shall

This matters because it changes what kind of promise you are relying on.

PG&E’s report characterizes the Commission’s guidelines in the course of explaining the misses. It states that the notification guidelines are “not a strict liability standard” and quotes them as saying the utilities “should, whenever possible, adhere to the following minimum notification timeline”. It further states that under Resolution ESRB-8 the Commission has said it is not practicable to require advance notification in every case, quoting: “it is an impossible feat of anticipating every emergency situation resulting in pro-active de-energization.”

We are describing that language as PG&E’s report presents it, in a filing PG&E made to the Commission and verified by one of its officers. We did not open the underlying decision text ourselves and we are not going to state a Commission-mandated hour figure on the strength of a utility’s summary of it. What is safe to take from this, and what a pet household should take from it, is the shape rather than the numbers: the published ladders describe what the operators aim for, and both the operator and the regulator have said in writing that aiming is not the same as guaranteeing.

The Commission does enforce. Its page states: “In September 2023, the CPUC established the PSPS Citation Program.” Enforcement is a good reason to expect the system to improve. It is not a reason to plan around the long rung.

What the Utilities Actually Publish About Pets

There is a version of this page that would claim nobody publishes pet guidance for a shutoff. That claim would be false, and the documents that falsify it are easy to open.

SDG&E publishes a pet document. It is a two-page Pet Disaster Checklist, document code S2650010 0226, copyright 2026, credited on its own face to cdc.gov. Its text layer is effectively empty, so it has to be read by rendering the pages as images, which we did on August 15, 2026. Step 1 is documents: veterinary records, rabies certificate, vaccinations, medical summary, prescriptions, and two species-specific lines that most generic kit lists omit, “Recent heartworm test result (dogs)” and “Recent FeLV/FIV test results (cats)”. It has fill-in fields for a microchip number, the chip company’s name and the chip company’s number, the last written on the document as Microchip Company # without saying what kind of number it wants. Step 2 is food, water and medications: “2-week supply of food for each animal stored in waterproof containers”, a two-week water supply for each animal, non-spill dishes, a manual can opener, feeding instructions for each animal, a two-week medication supply, and “One month supply of flea, tick, and heartworm preventative”. Step 3 is other supplies: leash, collar with ID and harness, toys, an appropriately sized carrier with bedding, a pet first aid book and kit, cleaning supplies, and a litter box line whose spelling on the document is “Literbox and litter (cat)”. That is the source’s own spelling and we are reproducing it rather than tidying it.

SCE publishes a pet line. Inside its PSPS preparedness answer, after telling customers to build an emergency plan and list where emergency items are kept, it says: “Be sure to add special needs items for loved ones, including pets.”

PG&E publishes one too, though not in the guide. Its outage-center page, under a list headed Follow Important Safety Tips, carries the item “Have an emergency plan in place, including pets”. That is on the same page as the service-animal sentence quoted later on this page, and it is not in the 39-page customer guide.

The joint site publishes a pet line, and a set of pet links. prepareforpowerdown.com’s What You Can Do Now list opens with: “Have a personal safety plan in place for every member of your household (including pets).” Its Emergency Preparedness checklist page carries a heading reading Pet or Service Animal Safety 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 sentence. Its August 16, 2021 release about a planned shutoff carries, under its before-a-shutoff list, the identical line: “Have a personal safety plan in place for every member of your household (including pets).”

So the material exists. Now the distinction that actually matters, and it is the whole reason this page has a card in it.

Every one of those is a kit list or a plan-exists reminder. Not one of them is attached to a notification rung. We opened PG&E’s PSPS page, its 39-page customer guide, its March 2026 fact sheet, its July 2026 post-event report and its outage-center page; SCE’s PSPS page and its Community Resource Centers page; SDG&E’s PSPS page and its Pet Disaster Checklist; both the prepareforpowerdown.com PSPS page and its checklist page; the CPUC’s PSPS page; Pacific Power’s PSPS page; the Xcel release; and both Cal OES pages, all on August 15, 2026. In none of them did we find an instruction of the form “at this many hours before the shutoff, do this with your animal.” That is a description of the sixteen documents we read rather than a claim about everything that has ever been published, and if your utility publishes one, its version outranks ours.

One more honest note on that 39-page PG&E guide, because it is the most detailed customer document any of these utilities publishes and it is worth knowing what is not in it. We searched its text for the words pet, animal and evacuate, and found no occurrence of any of them. Text extraction cannot see words that live only inside an image, so that is a statement about the document’s text and not a guarantee about every pixel of its 39 pages. But the guide runs to over seven thousand words of extractable text, and none of those words is pet.

The English list and the Spanish list are not the same list

SDG&E’s Pet Disaster Checklist is one file with two pages, English first and Spanish second, and reading them against each other turns up differences that no check of either page alone would surface.

The English Step 2 line reads “Non-spill food and water dishes”. The Spanish reads “Platos de agua y comida”. The word for non-spill is not there. The English Step 2 carries “2-week supply of any medications (if applicable)” and “Medication instructions (if applicable)”. The Spanish reads “Suministro de medicamentos para 2 semanas” and “Instrucciones de medicamentos”, both without the conditional. The Spanish Step 2 adds an item the English does not have, “Premios”, which is treats. The English carrier line reads “Appropriate-sized pet carrier with bedding, blanket, or towel”; the Spanish reads “Transportador de mascotas con toalla, cobija o sábana”, which drops the sizing instruction. And where the English closes Step 3 with the litter line, the Spanish closes with “Pala para caja de arena, arena y bolsas para desechos” and “Suministros de higiene de mascotas”, naming a scoop and waste bags the English does not.

The framing differs too. English Step 3 opens “Finish your kit by adding other important items.” Spanish Step 3 opens “Completa su paquete de evacuación de emergencias agregando estos articulos importantes.”, which describes the kit as an evacuation kit. Both versions already carry an evacuation line higher up, in the Step 2 introduction, so the divergence here is that the Spanish repeats the framing at Step 3 and the English does not, rather than the English never mentioning evacuation at all. What does differ across the two pages is the contents: two households in the same service territory, reading the same utility’s same document code, are told to build slightly different kits.

None of these differences is dangerous on its own. The reason to publish them is that a bilingual household should know the two pages are not interchangeable, and should read whichever one is more specific on any given line. If you keep this checklist on the fridge, keep both pages.

The Card, Built From the Bottom Up

Every countdown card in the world is written top down, starting with the longest rung, because that is how a timeline is drawn. For a PSPS that is the wrong order, and the reason is in the escape hatches above: on any given event, the top rungs may not exist for you. PG&E may not alert you until the day of. SCE may give you little to no notice. The July 2026 event compressed a three-day architecture into about a day.

So this card is built the other way. The bottom rung has to be survivable standing alone. Everything above it is bonus time, and each higher rung adds work that becomes impossible or expensive later, not work that is merely nice to have done.

Two things to know before you read it. First, the pet actions in this card are ours. As set out above, no operator we read assigns a pet action to a notification rung, so the assignment of task to rung is this site’s own construction from what the sources describe about timing and about what a shutoff does to a house. Second, the hour labels on the left are the rungs your utility publishes, so write your own utility’s rungs into the left column and ignore the ones it does not use.

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

This is the rung the whole card is built to survive, and it is the reason the work below it belongs to a quiet afternoon rather than to an alert.

If the power is already off and you did nothing beforehand, the sequence is: 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 different endings. Your utility’s outage map is the fastest answer, and SCE’s page notes that after a shutoff customers “can check the Outage Map to confirm it is due to PSPS.”

Water is the one item on this rung whose answer depends on where your water comes from, and this page does not give the same instruction to both households. On municipal water the tap keeps running because municipal pressure does not depend on your electricity, so fill containers now. On a private well it is the opposite: 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 the published sources in full and declines to tell a pet owner yes, and our outage hub reaches the same place. If you are on a well and the power is already off, the answer is stored water, not the faucet.

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

Rung one: one to four hours

Every one of the four ladders has a rung here. It is the last notification any of them promises before the power goes, and SCE states what it means: “If we estimate that power could be shutoff within one to four hours, SCE sends an expected shutoff notification to customers and public safety partners, when possible. After this notice, power shutoffs may occur at any time during the PSPS event.” After this notice, at any time. Treat it as now.

Do these, in this order:

1. Every animal indoors, contained and physically located. This is first because it is the only task on the whole 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, not loaded, just out where you can reach them without a light. The same action serves an evacuation if the weather turns, which is the branch below.
3. Water into containers. Fill what you have while the taps still work. If your home is on a private well, this is not optional and it is 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, any battery air pump or powered device an animal depends on.
5. Consolidate medication and cold-chain items. Get them into one place so a single decision covers them. What that decision should be is a clock of its own, and our page on pet medication and refrigeration during an outage works it out.
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, treat this as a rung you may skip straight past, and move its contents up into your one-to-four-hour block.

• Pre-cool or pre-heat the rooms the animals will occupy. Thermal mass is free storage and it is the cheapest backup power there is.
• Freeze water bottles and any gel packs, because the freezer is still running and in a few hours it will not be.
• Decide which single room the household and the animals will live in, and move bedding, litter and bowls into it now. A species-by-species look at how fast an indoor temperature actually decays is the page that 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 own pet checklist lists those as two separate lines for a reason.
• Top off the vehicle’s fuel and its charge. Pumps and chargers are on the same grid you are about to lose.

Rung three: about a day

Every utility on the table publishes something here. PG&E’s fact sheet calls one to two days its goal; SDG&E and the joint site publish a 24-hour rung; SCE publishes a one-day rung; Pacific Power publishes one day before.

• Test your backup power against the actual devices, not against the box. Whether your battery will run what you need for as long as you need is arithmetic, and our pet load power budget worksheet is where to do it rather than here.
• 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 becomes an empty plastic bowl the moment the power stops.
• Do a food and litter count against the length you are planning for. SDG&E’s checklist sets a two-week bar for both food and water per animal, which is longer than most shutoffs and is a reasonable place to be 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 on the last one. A shutoff is not an evacuation, but leaving before an event is a different job from leaving during one, and our page on how early to leave with pets covers the arithmetic of that decision for the hazards that give you any warning at all.
• 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 put a copy of the medication instructions with them. Treat that as a question rather than an assumption: our storm countdown card works through the emergency-refill provisions in detail and finds them conditional, tied to triggers that are not on any utility’s clock, and written about people rather than animals. The buffer that reliably exists on a two-day rung is the one you built months earlier, which our pet medication refill calculator puts a date on.
• Check on the neighbour who has animals and cannot lift them, or cannot drive, or does not read the utility’s notification language. The utilities will not do this for a pet household; in everything we read there is no registry for it, as the next section explains.

Rung five: three days out, and the rung nobody sends

SCE is the only one of the four that publishes a three-day customer rung, and its four-to-seven-day band is described as predictive modeling and a public weather dashboard rather than a notification. So for most readers, everything at three days and beyond is not a rung at all. It is the quiet afternoon.

That is where the real work lives, and it is at the end of this page.

The Registry That Exists for People, and the One That Does Not Exist for Animals

This is the closest analogue in the whole system to what a pet household needs, and it is worth understanding precisely, because the temptation is to assume it covers more than it does.

PG&E runs two tiers. Its PSPS page states: “If you rely on power for health and safety, we offer extra PSPS alerts. This may include alerting you in person to ensure you’re aware of a possible PSPS.” The first tier is the Medical Baseline Program, which the page describes as supporting “those who depend on power for certain medical needs.” The second is broader: “Vulnerable Customer Status also supports those who rely on power for health and safety. You can self-certify if you’re not eligible for Medical Baseline.” The customer guide describes the same second program under a slightly different name, Self-Identified Vulnerable, for customers who “have a serious illness or condition that could become life-threatening if electric service is disconnected”, and adds a maintenance requirement people miss: “Self-Identified Vulnerable status remains on a customer’s account for one year. Customers must renew each year to maintain enrollment.”

What those enrollments buy is persistence. The guide states: “For your safety, we will continue hourly attempts to notify you if you don’t respond. We may also attempt to contact you in person until we reach you.” And then the doorbell: “If we ring your doorbell and you are experiencing a life-threatening emergency, we will help you call 911. If you are not home, we will leave a doorhanger to let you know why we visited.” PG&E’s report on the July 2026 event confirms this ran in practice, describing hourly retries until the customer confirmed receipt and a representative visit if confirmation did not come.

SCE publishes the same architecture in its own words: “In the event of a PSPS, we will attempt to reach customers enrolled in the Medical Baseline Allowance program through their preferred contact method (email, text or voice call). If we cannot reach them directly, we will send a technician to their door in attempt to make in-person contact to deliver the message regarding the interruption.” It also runs a hardware program: “Our Critical Care Backup Battery (CCBB) program also offers free portable backup batteries that can power your medical devices during an outage or other extended outage.”

SDG&E puts medical baseline customers on the earliest customer rung it has: at two days ahead, it states, it “will start notifying customers who could be affected by a possible PSPS, including critical facilities and medical baseline customers, as well as state, county and city government agencies.”

Now the part a pet owner has to hear plainly. Every one of those programs is defined by a human medical need. In the sixteen utility and agency documents we read on August 15, 2026, we did not find any program that registers an animal’s dependence on electricity, and we did not find any utility statement that an animal’s needs affect notification, restoration priority or equipment eligibility. That is a description of what we searched, not a survey of every utility in the country, and a smaller operator may publish something we did not reach.

Here is what to do with that, and this is our reasoning rather than 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 single highest-leverage administrative act available to you, because it converts your household from one that receives an automated message into one the utility will keep calling hourly and eventually send a person to. The animals do not qualify. The household can, and the notification reaches the whole house. Whether a specific person qualifies is a question for the utility, and any question about what a specific animal can tolerate without power belongs to your veterinarian.

There is also a support route that is not utility-specific. PG&E’s fact sheet directs customers to contact 211 California, by dialing 211 or by texting the word PREPARE to 211-211, and states that 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. What 211 can and cannot do for an animal household, and how to ask, is covered on our page about using 2-1-1 to find pet help.

A Community Resource Center Is Not a Plan for an Animal

All three of the big California utilities open centers during a shutoff, and they are genuinely 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 there.

PG&E’s guide lists what a center may offer: 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 in that list. And the hours are the decisive fact: “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 own outage-center page, the one its guide points to at pge.com/crc, says the same thing about the hours in different words, “We open drop-in Community Resource Centers during the day in counties impacted by a PSPS or longer outage”, and it is the only document in this set that states whether an animal may come in at all: “Service animals are welcome at Community Resource Centers.” That page links to the Department of Justice’s service-animal guidance rather than setting its own rule.

SDG&E states that its centers “are equipped with water, Wi-Fi, snacks, ice and device charging stations.” No animal provision appears in that description either.

SCE publishes the longest list, and among the utilities’ PSPS pages it is the one that mentions an animal: “Services include updated outage information, PSPS alert enrollment support, mobile and portable medical device charging, restrooms, Wi-Fi, access to water, light snacks, ice and insulated cold bags for medications and resiliency kits. We also offer in-language support and accommodate customers with disabilities or other access and functional needs including wheelchairs, privacy screens, sensory kits and food supplies for service animals.”

Read the scope on that last item carefully, because it is easy to misread into something it does not say. It sits inside a sentence about accommodating 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 distinction is not a technicality when you are standing at a door with a carrier. Our page on pets at cooling and warming centers works through the service-animal-versus-pet question in the detail it deserves, including the federal regulation behind it and who actually decides at the door.

Worth knowing before you rely on that SCE sentence: SCE’s own dedicated Community Resource Centers page describes what a center provides without it, listing “on-site PSPS information, water, light snacks, resiliency kits, mobile device charging and portable medical equipment charging” and then in-language support and accommodations for customers with disabilities and other access and functional needs, with no animal named anywhere on the page. The service-animal line is on the PSPS page, not the centers page. Which page you happen to open changes what you are told.

So the two halves of the answer point in opposite directions, and both are worth knowing before you drive anywhere. If you handle a service animal, PG&E states outright that it is welcome at a center, SCE’s PSPS page says its centers stock food for one, and the access question is governed by federal disability law rather than by a utility’s preference. If you have a household pet, none of the center descriptions we read on August 15, 2026, across all three utilities, says a pet may enter, and none says one may not. That silence is not permission and it is not a refusal. It is a question you have to ask the specific site. We could not read SDG&E’s own dedicated centers page at all, which returns a page requiring JavaScript to our request, so treat that one as unchecked rather than as silent.

SCE adds a logistical fact that matters if you were planning to use a center as your fallback: “Locations are usually posted up to a day before a potential PSPS.” You cannot pre-scout the specific site; you can only pre-scout the utility page that will list it.

One more data point on what centers are actually used for, from PG&E’s July 2026 report: “During the July 15, 2026 PSPS, five CRCs were opened. These CRCs served 2,494 visitors, of which 2,438 did not remain on site”. Those visitors were given bags the report describes as containing a PSPS information card, water, non-perishable snacks, a mobile battery charger and a blanket. So on that event, the overwhelming majority of people who used a center treated it as a supply stop rather than a place to sit out the outage. That is a fact about that event, not a rule. But it fits what the published hours and resource lists describe, and here is our conclusion from putting the three descriptions and that attendance figure together, offered as this site’s reasoning rather than as any utility’s statement: 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. On that trip the animals stay where they already are, at home in the room you have set up for them or with whoever else is in the plan, and the center is a stop one person makes alone.

The Back Half: 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, the more important half is what happens after the weather improves, because that is where the duration you actually have to cover gets decided.

The weather clearing is the beginning of the restoration process. SDG&E publishes the sequence in the clearest terms of the three: “First, we need to record reduced wind speeds for a sustained period, then allow 4–8 hours of daylight for SDG&E field crews to patrol the line.” Then the constraints on that patrol: “Some circuits are in rural, mountainous areas that require a helicopter to patrol. In those cases, wind speeds need to be below 35 mph for the helicopter to fly safely. Additionally, for safety reasons, our crews cannot patrol at night.” And two sentences after the daylight requirement, in the same SDG&E answer, a step that has no fixed duration at all: “If there is any damage to the power lines or poles, repairs must be made first before power can be restored.”

Read those two sentences with a clock in your hand. Sustained reduced winds, then four to eight hours of daylight. If the wind drops at eight in the evening, the daylight requirement means 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 following afternoon instead.

SCE publishes a compatible figure for its own system: “Inspections typically take up to eight hours but may take longer if daylight is required for ground or aerial patrols (helicopter or drone).” PG&E publishes a goal rather than a mechanism: “Across our service area, our goal is to restore power within 24 hours after severe weather conditions have passed.”

On the July 2026 event PG&E reported hitting that goal comfortably. Two weather all-clears were issued, the company deployed approximately 84 personnel and 11 helicopters to patrol, and “Within 24 hours of the Weather All-Clear service to 100% of customers had been restored. The average restoration time was approximately 3.6 hours.” That is one event with no damage found, which is the easy case. SDG&E’s own answer names the hard one: in the case of fire or other adverse weather conditions, it states, the process can take days. SCE states flatly that “PSPS events may last over 24 hours.” And the joint site says outages “could last several hours or multiple days”.

SDG&E publishes one more line that heads off a specific kind of panic at hour eighteen: “As we work to restore power to everyone, you may see lights on in your vicinity, while your location remains in the dark. Different parts of a neighborhood may be on different circuits, and not all circuits are or can be restored at the same time.” Your neighbour’s porch light coming on is not evidence that your outage is over or that something is wrong with your service.

For a pet household the planning consequence is simple and it is our own conclusion from the operators’ published constraints rather than something any of them writes: 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. That is not an inference; it is a criterion, published by the operators themselves.

PG&E’s PSPS page lists what it considers when planning a shutoff, under the heading “We plan a PSPS when severe weather may put you at risk of wildfires”, and the list includes “Red Flag Warnings from the National Weather Service”. Its customer guide names the same criterion, “Red Flag Warning declared by the National Weather Service”, and its glossary defines the term: “A warning that is issued by the National Weather Service indicating current or expected red flag conditions, generally within the next 12 to 24 hours.” The joint utility site lists “RED FLAG WARNING” among the conditions that could lead to a shutoff, described as “declared by the National Weather Service”.

California’s own emergency management agency has described the pairing at the state level. In a release published August 16, 2021 about a planned shutoff across more than a dozen counties, Cal OES wrote that it was “coordinating closely with both firefighters and investor owned utilities to ensure the state is prepared to deal with the dual threats of new wildfires and utility-initiated power shutoffs.” The same release contains a fact that surprises people, and it is worth reading the whole sentence rather than the opening clause, because the second half describes what the state does instead: “While the state has no role in the decision by the utilities to shut off power to Californians, Cal OES is actively engaging with investor owned utilities Pacific Gas & Electric (PGE), Pacific Power and others to ensure orderly and proper use of public safety power shut offs (PSPS), while also actively working to mitigate any secondary dangers these power shutoffs may pose to the public.” That is a 2021 statement about a 2021 event, and we are dating it rather than presenting it as current operational guidance.

Cal OES’s current standing PSPS page is a single paragraph, and we are quoting it exactly as published, misspellings and all, because it is short enough that tidying it would misrepresent what the state actually offers a household: “Public Safety Power Shutoff events may occour when it is necesssary to turn off electricity during very dry and windy conditions, creating a heightned fire risk. High winds can cause trees or debris to damage electric lines, causing wildfires. As a result, power may be turned off during sever weather events.”

So what should a household with animals do with the overlap? Here is the boundary this page holds, and the part that is our own reasoning is labelled as such.

What the sources say: the utilities list a red flag warning among the conditions for a shutoff; the National Weather Service issues that warning for conditions generally expected within the next 12 to 24 hours, per PG&E’s glossary; and the state has described wildfires and shutoffs as dual threats to prepare for together.

What the sources do not cover: none of them tells a pet owner what to do differently because the two might arrive together. PG&E’s 39-page customer guide, the most detailed of these documents, contains no occurrence of the word evacuate in its text, and none of pet or animal either. SDG&E’s Pet Disaster Checklist contains no mention of a shutoff and no notification timing at all.

What this site concludes from putting them together, as our own reasoning: the actions that serve both branches should be done first and the actions that serve only one should be done last. Containment serves both, because a contained animal can be carried out and can also be 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. By contrast, 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. Do it after the portable work, not before.

And 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. If you are trying to read the levels those agencies use, our page on evacuation levels decoded for pet owners is the one to open.

One thing this page deliberately does not do is publish a red-flag-day routine. A red flag warning is issued far more often than a shutoff happens, and what to change about an ordinary day under one is a separate question from what to do when your utility tells you the power is going off. This page owns the shutoff event.

Your PSPS Pet Checklist

Print this and put it where the carriers live.

• Find out which utility serves you, and read that utility’s own notification ladder. SCE, SDG&E, PG&E and Pacific Power publish four different ones, and the joint preparedness site publishes one more that matches only one of those four.
• Write your own utility’s rungs into the card, and cross out the rungs 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 the contact details on the account are the ones you actually answer. PG&E states 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, and on the July 15, 2026 event PG&E reported it was not met even for them.
• Make the one-to-four-hour block survivable standing alone, because all four operators publish a no-notice caveat and one of them recorded a fast-onset event this year.
• Animals indoors, contained and located, first. It is the only task on the card that can fail permanently.
• Carriers out and open on the same rung, because the same action serves an evacuation.
• Fill water containers before the pressure goes, and if you are on a private well, treat this as a hard requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
• 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. It converts the household from one automated message into hourly retries and a possible doorbell.
• 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 we read states that a pet may enter. Service animals are the separate case: PG&E states they are welcome, and that question is governed by federal disability law rather than by a utility. If you drive to a center for supplies, never leave an animal in a parked vehicle while you go inside to ask; that is a stop one person makes alone while the animals stay at home.
• 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, helicopters need winds below 35 mph on SDG&E’s system, and crews do not patrol at night.
• 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

Four things, none of which can be done at the one-to-four-hour rung, and all of which make that rung short.

Settle the utility question in writing. Open your bill, find the company name, open that company’s PSPS page, and write its actual rungs on the card. If you are served by Liberty Utilities, Bear Valley Electric Service or PacifiCorp, this step matters more rather than less, because almost all published coverage is about the other three and none of it necessarily describes yours.

Settle the destination question with a phone call. The single most useful sentence you can own before a shutoff is a specific person at a specific address saying yes, all four of them, 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 both cover the version of this call where the first answer is no.

Settle the power question with arithmetic rather than with a purchase. Which of your animals’ devices actually need electricity, for how long, and whether the battery you own covers it, is a calculation, and it is one you want on paper before an alert. Our pet load power budget worksheet walks the arithmetic; if the answer turns out to be 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, not here. And if the answer 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 entire page that describes your household, and every published rung above it 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 and which one each of its guides runs on. 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 exactly that case, including the four household dependencies that genuinely need backup power and the three that do not.

If the outage is going to last weeks rather than hours, that is a different planning tier with different constraints, and the hub explains why it is not simply a longer version of this one.

If you want the same card shape for a storm, our T-minus storm countdown card is the sibling to this page and the mirror image of it: there, the countdown had to be assembled because no national household clock exists and the hour figures belong to individual states and counties, and here, several operators publish one and they disagree.

If you are trying to decide when to leave rather than how to stay, how early to leave with pets works the departure arithmetic for hazards that give you warning, and evacuation levels decoded for pet owners translates the terms your county will use if this turns into a fire evacuation.

Then do the one thing that pays off most, and it takes 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. Not the hours in an article. The hours from the company that will be the one turning your power off.