By Maggie Avants

The first of three phases in a widespread PG&E public safety power outage was implemented early Wednesday morning, leaving more than 74,000 customers in the North Bay and 513,000 across Northern California in the dark. The utility giant started cutting power at 12 a.m. across significant portions of its service territory, including in Napa, Sonoma, Solano, Marin, Yolo, Lake, Mendocino and Colusa counties.

Solano, Sonoma and Napa counties the hardest hit as of 2 a.m. Wednesday. The city of Fairfield had 17,963 customers powerless, while 13,665 were without power in Vacaville. The outage was affecting 19,357 PG&E customers in Napa, 15,925 in the city of Sonoma, 6,685 in St. Helena and 3,321 in Calistoga.

Source: PG&E Power Shutoff Latest: 74K In Solano Co., North Bay Affected | Suisun City, CA Patch