My wife and I were in San Luis Obispo June 23 on vacation.  That evening our room lights dimmed, a brown out.  A while later we lost power.  My wife looked out the window and reported not seeing any lights.  After finding two LED  flashlights I pulled out my hand held ham radio and turned to one of the local repeaters.  (146.670 MHz).  It took a while but within, I would guess fifteen minutes, we got a pretty clear picture that this was a very large outage.  Ham radio operators were reporting whether they had power or not.  One mobile operator reported at which freeway off ramp he determined the outage began going south on HWY 101.  We made a list of dark cities on a pad of paper and realized how extensive the outage was.

It seemed to take a while before there seemed to have an operator take charge.  My main criticism is this: I never heard any summary of what was reported by the control operator.  I think we need to be aware that media and some of the general public may listen to our communications.

Next morning at breakfast at Apple Farm Restaurant, I gave the complementary newspaper found outside our hotel room to my wife while I used my smart cell phone to read newspapers in California.  The San Luis Obispo newspaper, The Tribune, had by a mile, the best information.  All other papers were deficient or failed to carry the story.  I then realized that no major California paper had a California section.  You either have local or national news, both ends and no middle.