“Many friends and colleagues barely have enough emergency power to keep freezers cold and incubators running,” Julia Torvi, a graduate student and researcher at Berkeley, said in an email. “These two things hold millions of dollars of research, tens of years of effort, their contents being irreplaceable.”

[In NYT Parenting: Mothers band together to save breast milk during the outage.]

She pointed to a tweet by an associate professor at Berkeley that showed moving trucks outside a building on campus preparing to relocate freezers to U.C. San Francisco because the building doesn’t have a backup power source.

David Lerman, who emailed from Berkeley, said his daughter is a student at Humboldt State.

He said he was frustrated by a lack of information about how students living in dorms would be affected. Eventually he was able to text his daughter, he said, adding that she was fine and planning to hunker down.

More upsetting, he said, was that PG&E had spent decades building a flawed system that residents have no option but to rely on.

“I blame PG&E for causing danger and disruptions because they are too cheap and irresponsible to protect the state,” he said. “The exclusive use of massive and historic poorly maintained transmission lines through vast heavily wooded and dry fueled mountains is absurd.”

[Read about the latest in PG&E’s bankruptcy case.]

His frustration was echoed by residents and elected officials alike.

“Millions without electricity is what a third-world country looks like, not a state that is the fifth-largest economy in the world,” said Jim Nielsen, a state senator who represents the area around Paradise.