Is the power out in Big Bear 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.

Reports drop off the map after three hours unless somebody reports again, so what you see is current rather than a running tally. This is neighbours telling each other — it is not an official source, and it is not a substitute for reporting the outage to BVES.

Who to call: BVES supplies the whole 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. The valley is served differently from the areas below it, so the outage maps and phone numbers people find first are often not the right ones for up here.

To report a Big Bear power outage, call BVES at (800) 808-2837. Report it even when you can see that neighbours are affected too — a utility restores faster when it knows the shape of an outage, and a single house without power will not be noticed otherwise. Have your service address ready and, if you can, the time your power went out.

Treat a downed power line as live. Stay well clear, keep others and animals away, and call 911. Do not try to move it, and do not drive over a line lying across a road.

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. It is planned rather than a fault, and two things set it apart:

• 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, marked clearly, above routine notices.

What to do during a power 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 a winter outage becomes a heating problem within hours. Know whether your heating works without power, including the ignition and fans on a gas furnace.
• Never run a generator, barbecue or camp stove indoors or in a garage, even 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 behind an outage usually closes the highways too — check road conditions before deciding to leave, and see wildfire activity near Big Bear and live incidents in the valley.

How this page works

The notices at the top are read from Bear Valley Electric Service's own published updates and checked every few minutes; nothing there is written by hand. If BVES cannot be reached, the page says so plainly rather than showing an all-clear — "no outages posted" and "we cannot tell you" are different answers, and during a storm the difference matters.