Fire season with an employee in a corporate unit

Here is a situation I've watched play out more than once. An employee is three weeks into a furnished placement in the hills above Los Gatos or out toward Woodside. A shutoff is coming. PG&E sends the notice to the account holder, which is the housing provider. The provider's billing contact is an email address somebody checks on Tuesdays.

The employee finds out when the lights go off.

There's no dramatic outcome in most of these. It's a bad night, a scramble for a hotel, and a mobility manager fielding a call at 9pm. But it's entirely preventable, and the fix costs about fifteen minutes per placement.

The gap nobody notices

In a normal tenancy the occupant is the utility customer, so the utility talks to them directly. Corporate housing usually inverts that. Utilities are bundled into the rate, the provider holds the account, and your employee has no relationship with PG&E at all.

Every emergency notification system the region runs is built on the assumption that the person living somewhere is findable at that address. In a furnished placement, frequently nobody has made that true.

PG&E's alerts follow the account

PG&E says it aims to notify customers "as early as possible, both day and night, as needed," through email, phone calls, and text messages, with information available in 16 languages plus American Sign Language alerts.

It also says something that should shape how you plan: "in some cases we may not send the first alert until the same day your power is shut off."

That single sentence is why a policy of "the provider will let us know" isn't a policy. Even a well-run provider passing along a same-day notice through a billing inbox is going to be slower than the situation requires.

Address Alerts close most of it

The useful thing is that PG&E already built the fix and almost nobody in corporate housing uses it.

Address Alerts let anyone register for notifications about any address, whether or not they hold the account. PG&E's own list of examples includes your child's school, a parent's home, your workplace, other properties you own, and, in their words, "a rental unit where your landlord pays the PG&E bill."

That last example describes every corporate housing placement in the state. Your employee can register the unit's address in their own name with their own phone number, and they'll get the shutoff notice at the same time the account holder does.

The county systems are the other half

PG&E only tells you about PG&E's own shutoffs. Evacuation orders, fires, and everything else come from the county.

In Santa Clara County that's AlertSCC, a free system for anyone who lives or works in the county, sending text or voice messages to cell phones, home phones, and other devices, with TTY and TDD support. Registration is open to anyone at AlertSCC.com.

In San Mateo County it's SMC Alert, also free, running on the Smart911 platform. Registration lets you add multiple addresses, your home, your work, a child's school, and the county geocodes each one so alerts can be aimed at a neighborhood rather than blasted countywide. The county is blunt about the consequence of skipping that step: without at least one address on file, "you may miss an important alert or receive alerts from other parts of the county that don't apply to you."

For a relocating employee who has been in California for three weeks and doesn't yet know which county they're in, let alone which alert system serves it, this is exactly the kind of thing a mobility team should be handing them rather than hoping they find.

What this year has looked like

Some context so nobody over-rotates. PG&E's shutoff page lists three Public Safety Power Shutoff events in 2026: May 17 and 18, June 10 and 11, and July 15. Nothing in August, and nothing so far in September.

And as I write this, the National Weather Service office covering the Bay Area shows no red flag warning in effect. The current product page reads "None issued by this office recently."

So this isn't an emergency post. It's the opposite. The quiet stretch before the driest weeks of the year is exactly when you set this up, because the version of this conversation that happens during a warning is the one where somebody is already in the dark.

Deciding who pays before you need to

The operational question that trips teams up isn't the alert. It's the money, at 10pm, with a tired employee on the phone.

Decide in advance what happens when a unit loses power or an area is evacuated. Who authorizes a hotel. Whether the employee books it and expenses it or the provider arranges it. Whether the corporate housing invoice keeps running during the displacement, which it usually does, since your agreement pays for the unit rather than for electricity.

Then tell the employee the answer before they need it. A one-paragraph note at move-in saying "if the power goes out or you're told to evacuate, here's who to call and here's what we'll cover" prevents the entire category of problem. It also sits naturally alongside the rest of what you take on when you house a relocating employee.

While you're in the agreement, check what it says about habitability and interruption. Most corporate housing contracts are silent on extended utility outages, and silence resolves in favor of the invoice continuing.

Fifteen minutes per placement

Have the employee register the unit address for PG&E Address Alerts under their own phone number.

Have them sign up for the county system that covers the unit, AlertSCC in Santa Clara County or SMC Alert in San Mateo County, with the unit address entered so the alerts are aimed at where they live.

Put the provider's after-hours number in their phone, not in a welcome packet. Confirm it's a number a human answers, because the main line during business hours is not the same thing.

And write down your displacement policy once, then reuse it. If you're already reviewing terms for assignments that run across the holidays, add this to the same pass.

It's an unglamorous checklist. It's also the difference between an employee who feels looked after in an unfamiliar place and one who spends a night deciding your company doesn't have its act together.

Placing employees into the Peninsula or South Bay this fall? Request a free consultation and we'll go through inventory, terms, and the readiness details most agreements leave out.

Sources

• Public Safety Power Shutoffs — PG&E
• AlertSCC Emergency Alert and Warning System — Santa Clara County Fire Department
• Sign Up for Emergency Alerts, AlertSCC — County of Santa Clara Office of Emergency Management
• SMC Alert — County of San Mateo
• Red Flag Warning products, San Francisco Bay Area — National Weather Service
• Community Wildfire Safety Program — PG&E