In Dimmed Shops, Fingers Point in All Directions

Ever try selling black leather jackets in a blackout-blackened store? John Ma of USA Leathers doesn’t recommend it. His mood Thursday morning? The color of his wares.

Ever hawk Chinese soapstone carvings by flashlight? On Day 2 of California’s rolling power outages, Ken Chan did his very best. Sad to say, it wasn’t good enough. His view of Pacific Gas & Electric? As dim as the lightless Kee Fung Ng Gallery.

And don’t even ask how Nicholas J. Toth, 84, feels about the outages that have rolled through Northern California this week. Not unless you want an earful from a guy who’s trying to sell insurance but couldn’t even get into his office Thursday.

The Golden State? Not hardly. Not Thursday. More like the Grumpy State, the Suspicious State, the Conspiracy-Theory State. With hundreds of thousands in the dark two days in a row, normally sunny Californians are finally acknowledging that the festering energy crisis is a reality.

Which means it’s time to find someone to blame.

Shelley McDonough, a mother of two in the Sacramento suburb of Orangevale, said she thought “they were all crying wolf” about the energy crisis until the outages hit in her neck of the woods this week. Now that it’s for real, she said, she’s “horrified that the politicians did not anticipate this problem.”

“I think it’s incredibly irresponsible for them to approve all this growth--all these new houses--without the certainty that we’ve got the basic resources like water and power to supply them,” she said. To prepare for outages she’s sure will hit her house soon, she vacuumed like mad and bought extra flashlights and batteries.

Pacific Gas and Electric, with 4.6 million mostly unhappy customers, is high on everyone’s culprit list. The Legislature, which deregulated the energy industry, is up there too. Out-of-state energy companies that supply California’s utilities universally wear black hats in these parts as well.

Gov. Gray Davis isn’t all that popular, and even former Gov. Jerry Brown came in for criticism Thursday. Why not reach back a few decades?

Paul Miller, manager of a San Francisco Lamps Plus store, pointed the finger at Sacramento in general, Davis and Brown in particular. “We could have gone ahead in the 1970s with nuclear power, but the industry was killed,” said Miller, who’s now doing a land-office business in power-saving fluorescent bulbs. “We could have had all the cheap, clean power we need.”

Annoyed by Lack of Warning

To Paul Kim, the enemy was easy. The owner of the Bay Area Diabetes Supply Center, Kim blames the power companies for the Thursday morning blackout that wiped out computerized data on many of his 10,000 customers, important things such as doctors’ authorizations for special products and equipment.

“I wish they gave us a little notice,” said Kim, shaking his head, “because then I could turn off the computers safely and not lose data. There was a story [about the blackouts], but we had no idea when it would happen.”

PG&E; does not give advance notice of where the blackouts will hit, and the inability to plan for the outages was one of the biggest complaints of consumers interviewed this week.

City Futon, deserted at midday, lost phone orders, cash registers, walk-in business. Two shipments of dozens of mattresses had to be canceled because a lightless downstairs showroom was shuttered. The manager, who would identify himself only as David under company policy, said he had to tell customers to return.

“Nobody likes to have power cut off,” he said, blaming PG&E; for the sudden shadow. “Boom! I hope this won’t happen again. It hurts everyone’s business. At home you can do without lights and TV, but not here.”

William Peterson, a professor of theater arts at Cal State University San Bernardino, which did not experience a blackout but is nevertheless drastically conserving, thinks the news media should have sounded the alarm about the state’s energy crisis months ago.

But more than the newspapers and television stations, he blames deregulation and out-of-state energy producers for a campus office that starts the day at about 50 degrees and doesn’t get much warmer. His university was able to buy power at a reduced rate by agreeing to cut use at peak times. Like this entire week.

“We’re all sitting there with our hats and gloves,” he said. “It would be easier to take, if not for the prospect that this will continue indefinitely. The idea that we could be facing weeks of this makes me pretty crazy. I know it does the students as well.”

Even in good times, Californians tend to have strong suspicions about what they consider the cozy relationships between their government and special interests, said Mark Baldassare, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.

But now, as the lights blink out and the outrage blinks on, most are beginning to believe “that the utilities have created a situation where they can take advantage of consumers,” he said. That sentiment showed up in a PPIC survey released Wednesday, in which 92% of those questioned said they view the deregulated electricity market in California as a problem.

San Francisco Files Suit

The city of San Francisco, plagued by outages both Wednesday and Thursday, did more than just point the finger. City Atty. Louise Renne filed suit against a dozen energy suppliers, charging that they are artificially manipulating supplies to keep prices high.

“I think consumers know when they are being conned, and this is a clear instance of corporations taking advantage of a deregulated market to make a quick buck,” Renne said in a statement. “In a freely competitive market, prices would be substantially lower. Consumers and taxpayers are rightfully outraged.”

Two subsidiaries of Enron Corp. were named in the suit. Mark Palmer, an Enron spokesman, said the San Francisco charges “are frivolous and baseless claims that three separate federal and state agencies have investigated.”

Palmer will have a tough time persuading self-proclaimed cynics like Neil Berman, who delivered mail Thursday to darkened schools in Fresno. Berman called the blackouts and the entire crisis “a bunch of bull, a ploy” instigated by greedy energy producers.

“Why have natural gas prices doubled and we have no shortage of that?” Berman asked. “Why all of a sudden? Why now?”

And who does the beleaguered PG&E; blame, with all those fingers pointed its way? Spokesman John Nelson said his agency figures that “deregulation is only partly to blame” and “there isn’t any point to finger-pointing.”

On the other hand, the state uses more electricity than it generates, he said. Whenever California can’t import enough to make up for the shortage there will be a rolling blackout, deregulation or no.

To Nelson, we’re all to blame.

“If you wanted to go through the laundry list of who had a role in this, it includes every stakeholder and the vast majority of voters and generators and utilities and elected officials. Everybody had a role in it.”

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Times staff writers Shawn Hubler, Rebecca Trounson, Mark Arax, Jennifer Warren, Nicholas Riccardi and Joseph Menn contributed to this story.