stevenal, most water (and sewer) utilities are required by law to have their own backup generators in place.
The bigger problem is turning out to be communications. The steady loss of "hard wired" phone systems to cell based phones has resulted in people not being able to call for emergency services or get warnings when power is out. In one of our nearby communities last night (Moraga, in the hills east of Oakland) where power was cut, there was a house fire and it took a long time for firefighters to get notice of it, so it spread. Apparently the local cell towers had battery backup, but no generator so once the batteries died, all cell phone service was lost.
Personally, I don't really blame PG&E. The entire problem is much more complex than most of the media bothers to check into, because people love to find easy villains. We (collectively) in California did this to ourselves really, starting in about 1996 with partial deregulation for the sake of "introducing competition". We forced the electric utilities to divest themselves of most of their power generation capability and become "distributors" who can only make money on margin, not production. They no longer control the cost to produce the electricity, but the price they sell it for is still controlled by the PUC. Yet they are required to maintain the entire grid on what margin they are allowed to make. So being a publicly traded company with fiduciary responsibility to stockholders, they only thing they have control over is their grid operating and maintenance costs. At one point during the "Western Power Crisis" in 2000-2001, PG&E was losing upward of $20 million PER DAY because they were forced to buy power for upward of $1.35 per kWH during peak demands and yet still forced to sell it for $0.067/kWH. They declared bankruptcy back then too and have basically never recovered to their former status and that sort of thing causes deferred maintenance, which is exactly what happened. So now when the lawsuits hit over the fires a few years ago, they had to declare bankruptcy yet again and that cycle will continue.
PS: I love all the people saying "They should bury all the power lines!". Estimates run upward of $3 million per mile for underground utilities in urban and suburban areas, and PG&E owns 106k+ MILES of power distribution lines alone, then another 18k+ miles of transmission lines. So we are talking about well over $300 billion dollars...
But I'd say probably 99% of the people I have talked to in the last few weeks are totally unaware that PG&E no longer generates most of the power they sell (they still own the Diablo Canyon nuke plant until it is shut down in 2024 and a few small hydro dams that they couldn't find buyers for, but that's it). Almost all of the power generation is coming from Mirant, Dynegy, AES and Williams (and originally, the good folks at Enron, who were the main protagonists of this fiasco in the late 90s). So while all of those companies are making record profits, PG&E gets the blame AND the lawsuits when their cutback on maintenance resulted in failures.
This is those 1996 chickens coming home to roost...
" We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know." -- W. H. Auden