(TNS) — A growing brush fire was threatening thousands of homes in Brentwood and other Westside hillside communities, burning several structures and prompting widespread evacuations early Monday.

The Getty fire broke out shortly before 2 a.m. along the 405 Freeway near the Getty Center and spread to the south and west, rapidly burning 400 acres and sending people fleeing from their homes in the dark. About 3,300 homes were under mandatory evacuation orders.

(TNS) — A fast-moving wildfire ignited late Wednesday in a remote, mountainous stretch of northeastern Sonoma County, rapidly growing to an estimated 5,000 acres amid intense winds and prompting evacuations outside Geyserville.

The fire is burning near The Geysers geothermal plant in the Mayacamas Mountains and the glow of flames is visible throughout the area.

(TNS) - California residents face up to 10 years of widespread, precautionary forced power shut-offs until Pacific Gas & Electric Corp., the bankrupt utility giant, will be able to prevent its power transmission lines from sparking fires, the company’s top official said.

The sobering projection came from company Chief Executive William D. Johnson at an emergency meeting Friday of the California Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco.

(TNS) - This week marks 30 years since the massive 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area, killing 63 people, injuring nearly 4,000 and causing extensive damage that left thousands homeless.

Generally, people in this part of the state are not too concerned about quakes. Should they be?

Earthquakes, big and small, are a common occurrence in California. Residents hear reports of them all the time – most recently the 4.5 magnitude quake that hit near Pleasant Grove on Monday. The reports are usually just far enough away from the Yuba-Sutter area that residents tend to think things like that won’t happen here.

(TNS) — In the aftermath of the Loma Prieta 6.9 temblor and its aftershocks in Northern California, hundreds of underground utility pipes began “bleeding” out the region’s water supply.

(TNS) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom is set to unveil the state's new earthquake early warning app, MyShake, at 11 a.m. Thursday, available on iOS and Android on the 30th anniversary of the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake. The announcement will be streamed live.

How much warning would MyShake have provided if an earthquake warning system were available in 1989?

(TNS) — The inventory of woes from last week’s PG&E’s power shutdown across Northern and Central California continues to come in:

Students at UC Berkeley worrying that the intentional outage may have resulted in the loss of two years of research into fighting drug-resistant forms of cancer. Businesses that lost income from the cutoff even as PG&E’s website crash sowed widespread confusion and chaos. Reports of vehicle collisions at intersections where the power to traffic lights had been cut. And scores of elderly people and others whose lives are dependent on electricity living through desperate hours of wondering how they’d manage to get by until power was restored.

(TNS) — Classes were canceled. Frozen foods melted. Hospitals switched to emergency generators. Blooms withered in florists’ coolers. Unused food was jettisoned at shuttered restaurants. Lines formed at gas stations. Cellphones faded out.

That’s what happened Wednesday when the state’s largest utility shut off power to millions of Californians in a drastic attempt to avoid the killer wildfires that have charred hundreds of thousands of acres, caused billions of dollars in damage and spurred cries for widespread change in how electricity is delivered over the state’s aging grid.

Maurice Singleton is the president of Vidsys, where he leads business initiatives for the development of innovative product enhancements, customer experience improvement, business growth and expansion into emerging markets. Vidsys provides physical and converged security information management (PSIM and CSIM) solutions whose security software platform enables organizations in a number of market verticals, including corporate, government, health care and critical infrastructure, to achieve more effective enterprise security and risk management.

Singleton responded to a series of written questions.

(TNS) - In a historic move to avert another fiery disaster, PG&E is turning off power to as many as 800,000 customers in Northern and Central California Wednesday, prompting residents, schools, businesses and local officials to make hurried plans to cope without electricity possibly for several days.

With wind speeds expected between 40 mph and 70 mph over sunbaked land Wednesday and Thursday, the state’s largest utility opted to preemptively cut power in parts of 34 counties, including Sonoma, Marin, Napa, Mendocino and Lake counties in the North Bay.

PG&E, driven into bankruptcy in January facing about $30 billion in liabilities for the 2017 wildfires, adopted temporary power shut-offs as a key part of its wildfire prevention plan. A majority of those catastrophic blazes were attributed to the company’s equipment.