Nearly 3,000 people started their Fourth of July holiday in the dark Tuesday.
Parts of Martinez, Pleasant Hill and Lafayette were all hit by power outages.
Frustrated neighbors said they know what happened but think it could’ve been easily avoided.
Utility crews worked on removing some of the tree branches by power lines.
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Those are the same branches neighbors said they have been concerned about for years -- the same branches they've asked PG&E to address before, and early Tuesday morning, their fears became a reality.
“I heard this crackling noise like … and I was like ‘what could that be?’” said Catherine Jester of Lafayette.
Waking up to fire from a powerline on the other side of her fence around 3:30 a.m. is not the kind of sparks Jester was hoping to see this Fourth of July.
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“The orange glow was pretty much the entire span of this fence and I knew immediately it was a fire,” she said.
She added that her husband and a neighbor grabbed nearby hoses to spray the fence to prevent the flames from jumping over to their house.
Jester believes overgrown tree branches leaning on power lines caused the line to snap, triggering the fire on Reliez Valley Road in Lafayette.
It’s a concern Jester says she has raised with PG&E for years.
“They kept saying 'yeah, yeah, yeah we will do something’ then finally they did come out and they trimmed it but it was like a little trim. It didn’t solve the problem. Clearly, because now after the fire, they are taking the tree down,” said Jester.
PG&E says crews were able to restore power for most customers.
But about 400 people spent most of the holiday without air conditioning or electricity in Lafayette and Martinez as food and tables sat prepped and ready for a holiday celebration.
The utility company has not confirmed a cause for the downed power line, but neighbors say they're confident it could've been avoided.
“The lines are running through a lot of trees in this area, you should be cutting those trees down. That’s the first thing I thought of,” said Debbie Deeney of Lafayette.
NBC Bay Area asked PG&E for comments specifically about neighbors concerns but they say they cannot comment until after the holiday.
Crews replaced the line this afternoon, turning the lights back on around 3 p.m.
Neighbors say they feel the utility needs to be doing more to prevent future fires.
“What they are doing right now, if they had done that two days ago, this fire wouldn’t have happened,” said Jester.
