Power restored for most of San Francisco after widespread outage

San Francisco - Power was restored for tens of thousands of electricity customers in San Francisco late Saturday, after an hourslong outage affecting nearly a third of the city left many neighborhoods in darkness by nightfall.

About 24,000 of the city’s 4,14,000 customers were without power as of 1:30 am. Sunday, down from about 1,24,000 early Saturday evening, according to the site PowerOutage.com. Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility serving the city, said on social media that its crews were working through the night.

When night fell, the outage was affecting many neighborhoods in the northern half of the city, including the Richmond and Sunset districts, and stretching through Haight Ashbury into downtown.

Much of the west side near Golden Gate Park and north toward the Presidio were dark. So was City Hall’s dome. Pedestrians used their phone flashlights to cross streets as some restaurants served meals by candlelight.

The outage forced stores and mass-transit stations to close, and led Waymo to temporarily suspend its driverless car services. The San Francisco Ballet canceled a performance of “The Nutcracker”.

The cause of the outage was not immediately clear. A fire at a five-story Pacific Gas & Electric substation in the South Market neighborhood Saturday was a contributing factor, said Lt. Mariano Elías, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Fire Department.

Power had been out in parts of the city before the fire started Saturday afternoon, according to a map of outages maintained by Pacific Gas & Electric. The number of outages expanded by tens of thousands of customers around the same time as the fire. But Elías said he could not say whether the fire was the sole cause.

The fire had been extinguished by Saturday night.

The outage proved frustrating to people attending gatherings and shopping on the last weekend before the Christmas holiday. Stores and restaurants were also struggling to conduct transactions without their electronic payment systems in the tech-driven city.

Cellphone service was initially intact, but some towers went dark and data speeds were slower than usual — when available — because residents no longer had Wi-Fi. Many of the businesses, restaurants, bars and grocery stores on Divisadero Street near Alamo Square closed until their power was restored.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit system closed its Powell Street and Civic Center stations in downtown San Francisco because of the power outage. The city’s Muni light-rail system also had to curtail service because the outage impacted the computer system controlling its trains.

But there were mixed indications of how well Waymo’s driverless taxis were functioning at such intersections, with social media users reporting that some were stuck and clogging roads. The company temporarily suspended services Saturday night because of the power outage and was still working to bring the taxis back into service as of Sunday morning, according to Suzanne Philion, a company spokesperson.

Some drivers looking to escape the city were stuck at a gas station, waiting to pump gas after the power went out at 2:30 p.m. Pacific time. The pumps rely on electricity.

“No power, no business,” said Kevin Lee, a gas station attendant.

At one neighborhood watering hole, Fool’s Errand, the power outage attracted a crowd looking for something to do. The business was taking cash payments, and beer and wine were flowing.

Some customers who sat down before the power went out were unable to pay, but a surprising number of them still carried cash, said Denise Yuki, 37, who runs the bar with her fiance.

“We got these lights from our neighbor,” she said, pointing to some battery-operated lamps that had been placed on tables.

She added that some neighbors had been so grateful the bar was still open that they began trying to acquire candles for the business.

When the lights started to flicker back on shortly after 9 p.m., Jacob Oakman, 27, and his partner, Tokay Alberts, 25, were taking in the view of the darkened city from Alamo Square Park.

Oakman, a software engineer, said he was slightly disappointed to get power back. “It’s nice to see it, but it’s a bit bittersweet,” he said.

Alberts, a master’s student at San Francisco State University, had a similar reaction.

“I wanted to do a puzzle by candlelight,” he said.