Major Power Outages Affect Thousands Of PG&E Customers In East Bay, San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- Approximately 113 PG&E customers in the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco were still without electric power as of about 9 p.m., more than two hours after their power went out, a PG&E spokesman said Sunday night.
That outage was reported at 6:43 p.m., said PG&E spokesman J.D. Guidi said. The cause of that outage had not been determined Sunday night, and there was no estimated time for when those customers would have power again, Guidi said.
This relatively small outage was preceded Sunday by a much larger one affecting some 13,000 PG&E customers in the city, which Guidi said was caused by an equipment failure at a PG&E substation. The last of those customers had their power restored at 1:09 p.m. Sunday.
The East Bay dealt with a major power outage Sunday, too, with more than 33,000 PG&E customers from Oakland north to San Pablo affected. Service was completely restored by 11 a.m.; the outage began at 7:35 a.m.
By far the hardest hit city was Berkeley, Guidi said, where the downtown BART station was forced to close and traffic signals went dark. Other cities hit by the East Bay outage were Richmond, Albany, El Cerrito, and Kensington.
The East Bay outage was caused by an equipment failure at the PG&E substation on Schmidt Lane in El Cerrito and the cause is under investigation.
BART had reported major delays during the outage and its downtown Berkeley station reopened after a generator was brought in, but elevators and escalators are not currently working at the station, the transit district said via Twitter.
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