But much of the surrounding Bay Area and beyond could go dark, including large swaths of Silicon Valley, the cities of Oakland and Berkeley and much of the Northern California wine country hit by wildfires that killed 44 two years ago. The outage also affects parts of the agricultural Central Valley, the state's northern and central coasts and the Sierra Nevada foothills where a November wildfire blamed on PG&E transmission lines killed 85 people and devastated the town of Paradise.

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