When I lived in the Midwest they had a lot of lines buried, there. I dunno how they did it anywhere else I lived.
In the Midwest my dad's mom had a house right next to hers get poofed by a tornado and we had them rip through where I lived, plenty. The gusty winds they talked about here as the reason to shut everyone down, there, we called it, the walk to school. I can remember dodging behind bushes on the way to class in winter with my friends, pretending we were S.W.A.T., to get out of the wind. You could never set a piece of paper down, there, ever. Always windy.
When I lived on the east coast we had Hurricane Floyd as my most memorable weather event..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_FloydWhen I lived in Europe we would get snow on the ground for so long, and so deep, that people made bars out of snow in their yards and filled them with alcohol bottles when they had friends over.
Never did I ever lose power for more than maybe a day at most, anywhere. I watched most of the hurricane on TV until I finally fell asleep and it passed right over, leaving rainwater to the bottom of Stop Signs in my town that was even smaller. I've been lucky, sure, but still.
Here, we currently have some near freezing nights with gorgeous days once it warms up. No wind whatsoever most of the day, as ever. High humidity at night, as ever, and currently the nights are longer than the days. Birds singing. Grass growing. They shut us down for 5 solid days with hardly any warning at all and then called it a Planned Event (dictated by the weatherman who is right maybe half the time around here when it's not every day the same weather..).
I dunno what California ISO is (a label or company) but the power company here is called PG&E. You know how the sun can punish things, here.. They have a pole a quarter mile from here that's bent into an 'r'. They have a pole next to me with so much crap hanging off of it and bolted into and through it that I have no idea what holds the thing up. Hence the 'rickety ass' evaluation. Plus, they had to shut down the power for hundreds of miles, due to.. we're all interconnected somehow (was the story) and so when some key connections failed by being wind damaged, apparently, it caused alllll of us to lose power. Somehow.
Anyway, yeah. I never saw anything like that. It was like something you read about happening somewhere far away and that couldn't happen here. 5 solid days without power during nothing but nice and not unusual weather and with no threat of fire, and, the whole time (after the first day or so) the local politicians were all saying PG&E was either telling them BS or nothing at all.