Is the power out in Big Bear right now?
Bear Valley Electric Service has one current notice — scheduled work or service updates rather than an unplanned outage. The detail is below.
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The notices above are what BVES has published. A new outage is usually underway long before any notice appears, which is what the neighbour map below is for. Report your outage to BVES as well — this map tells your neighbours, it does not tell the utility.
Outage map: who has power right now
Neighbours reporting from around the valley. An area appears here once several separate people in it report an outage — one report on its own stays private.
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Who supplies power in Big Bear Valley
Big Bear Valley is served by Bear Valley Electric Service (BVES). If you live in Big Bear Lake, Big Bear City, Sugarloaf, Fawnskin, Moonridge or Erwin Lake, BVES is your electricity provider and the organisation that restores your service.
That is worth knowing before an outage rather than during one, because the valley is served differently from the communities down the hill, and the outage maps and phone numbers people find first are often not the right ones for up here.
Bear Valley Electric Service publishes its own outage and service notices, and those are what this page reads.
How to report a Big Bear power outage
Report an outage directly to BVES. Reporting it matters even when you can see that neighbours are affected too — a utility restores faster when it knows the shape of the outage, and a single house without power will not be noticed otherwise.
Treat a downed power line as live. Stay well clear of it, keep others and animals away, and call 911 first. Do not attempt to move it, and do not drive over a line lying across a road.
Have your service address ready, and if you can, note the time your power went out.
What a public safety power shutoff (PSPS) is
A public safety power shutoff is a deliberate outage. When fire weather is severe enough — dry fuel, low humidity and high wind together — a utility may switch off parts of the network on purpose, because an energised line brought down by wind can start a fire.
Two things make a shutoff different from an ordinary outage, and both matter for how you prepare:
- It is announced in advance, usually with a window rather than an exact time, because it depends on the weather actually arriving.
- It can last far longer. Power is not restored until crews have patrolled the lines and confirmed they are undamaged, which cannot begin until the wind drops. Plan in days, not hours.
Shutoff notices are shown at the top of this page and marked clearly, above routine maintenance notices.
What to do during an outage in Big Bear
A mountain outage is not the same as a valley-floor one, and a few things catch people out:
- If you are on a well, you have no water either. Well pumps are electric. Store drinking water ahead of fire season and before forecast storms.
- Heat. At this elevation an outage in winter is a heating problem within hours. Know whether your heating needs electricity to run, including the ignition and fans on a gas furnace.
- Never run a generator, barbecue or camp stove indoors or in a garage, including with the door open. Carbon monoxide kills people during outages every winter.
- Fuel and cash. Pumps and card readers are electric. If a shutoff is forecast, fill up beforehand.
- Traffic signals. Treat a dark intersection as an all-way stop.
- Roads may matter more than power. The weather that causes a shutoff or an outage is usually the weather that closes the highways — check road conditions before deciding to leave.
Related conditions in the valley
Outages rarely happen on their own. The same storms and fire weather drive everything else this site tracks:
- Wildfire activity near Big Bear — the fire weather behind most shutoffs.
- Road conditions and chain control — whether you can get up or down the hill.
- Live incidents in the valley — what is happening right now.
How this page works
The notices above are read directly from Bear Valley Electric Service's own published updates and refreshed every few minutes. Nothing on this page is written by hand, and nothing is inferred.
If the feed cannot be reached, this page says so plainly rather than showing an all-clear. "No outages reported" and "we cannot tell you" are different answers, and during a storm the difference matters. Deciding you are fine on the strength of a page that has simply stopped updating is the failure this is designed to avoid.