A massive power failure darkened entire neighborhoods of San Francisco Saturday in a series of widespread blackouts that, by mid-afternoon, impacted nearly 130,000 homes and businesses – representing about one-third of all city customers served by Pacific Gas and Electric Co.
Traffic stalled as street lights went dark or into emergency blinking mode, confusing driverless Waymos which eventually suspended service. Restaurant workers put out candles for diners. BART trains bypassed Powell and Civic Center stations where there was no electricity, before service was restored, and MUNI trains were not traveling to underground stops. Holiday decorations went unlit in doorsteps and windows.
San Francisco was unusually dark Saturday evening as portions of the city suffered through a sprawling power outage. Meanwhile, downtown glowed in the background. (Yalonda M. James/S.F. Chronicle)
From across the Golden Gate Bridge, the usually-bright lights of the city were instead dark. The few parts of the city left with electricity were obscured by low-hanging fog.
Much of the city was still dark at 8:30 p.m. when PG&E released a video saying power was expected to be restored Saturday night. No specific timeline was shared, but by 9 p.m. 90,000 customers had their power restored, according to PG&E. The company said it expected the remaining 42,000 customers without power to have their service returned overnight.
The outages began in the morning on the West Side of the city, but then, block-by-block, more San Franciscans began losing electricity. At least a portion of the blackouts that began in the afternoon were triggered by a fire inside a PG&E power substation,but the reasons for the other blackouts in portions of the Richmond, the Sunset and other West Side neighborhoods remained unexplained for most of the day.
As of 5:30 p.m., a PG&E spokesperson said the company couldn’t provide an estimate for when power might be restored for any part of the city.
“It sucks,” said Samantha Lado, who works at Foghorn Taproom in the Inner Richmond. The blackouts left the bar’s televisions black and the beer warm – so they wouldn’t draw a crowd of patrons to watch two football games, as they’d expected.
By mid-afternoon, San Francisco had opened its emergency operations center to coordinate the city’s response. Mayor Daniel Lurie posted a video from inside the center urging people “to be safe out on the roads.”
Aristides Rodriguez, an employee at Bill’s Place, holds a flashlight during Saturday’s power outage in San Francisco. (Benjamin Fanjoy/For the S.F. Chronicle)
“A lot of the lights are out,” Lurie said. “Stay safe and we will continue to be in touch with PG&E.”
San Francisco Fire Lt. Mariano Elias said that a fire broke out inside a PG&E substation at 8th and Mission streets at about 2:15 p.m., which caused at least some of the blackouts. PG&E employees called 911 at 2:16 p.m. to report smoke inside the building. Firefighters were using specialized carbon monoxide equipment to extinguish the flames on the first floor of the four-story building, Elias said. A spokesperson for PG&E said that, as of 6 p.m., the fire department had fully extinguished the blaze in the substation building, and company investigators had entered the building to begin determining the cause.
But by then, swaths of the city had already been in the dark.
The first outage, reported around 9:40 a.m., took out power to just over 14,600 residential and commercial customers in the Inner Sunset down to Forest Hill, according to PG&E’s website.
A second outage started around 10:10 a.m., cutting electricity across the Presidio, the Richmond and some sections of Market Street. PG&E’s online outage tracker showed more than 24,800 customers were affected. At 1:40 p.m., the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency announced Muni trains would bypass the Van Ness station due to the outage. By 3 p.m., the outages had spread south into the Outer Sunset and out east across the city. One outage stretched from Hayes Valley to part of the Mission, leaving nearly 2,400 customers without power. Another near Alamo Square took out power to another 6,300 customers. Muni and BART trains began bypassing Civic Center and Powell.
By 6 p.m., the rain had lightened and traffic through the Presidio began to flow normally. Homes with Christmas trees in their windows and lights adorning their front porches instead sat dark save for flickering candles.
For hours, PG&E provided the public with little information, apart from the company’s online outage map as the blackouts began to cover larger portions of the city.
Pedestrians walk by Harrington Gallery on Valencia St, in San Francisco, which was hosting a pop up holiday market as the power went out on Saturday. (Aidin Vaziri/S.F. Chronicle)
The company’s first public response was posted to social media platform X at 4 p.m.: “We are working with first responders and city officials on an outage in #SanFrancisco affecting 130,000 customers. We will share more information as it becomes available.”
Some San Francisco residents reported receiving automated phone calls from PG&E saying there was no estimated time that power would be restored but the company, in its social media post, said it would “continue to provide updates on the estimated time of restoration as crews assess the damage and make repairs.”
Businesses across the city were forced to close at the height of holiday shopping and socializing – from Julie’s Pizza in the Lower Haight to Miller & Lux at Chase Center. The Randall Museum in Corona Heights, the California Academy of Sciences and all city library branches sent patrons home. The iconic neon blade of the 500 Club bar in San Francisco’s Mission District went dark. An hour into a symphonic take on the classic holiday movie “Home Alone” at Davies Symphony Hall, the lights went out and the show was, abruptly, over. Â
Storefronts along normally bustling commercial corridors were quiet.
A sign rests during a power outage in San Francisco on Saturday. (Benjamin Fanjoy/For the S.F. Chronicle)
As soon as the electricity went out at Bazaar Cafe in the Richmond, owner Josh Johnson said he had to close and ask customers to leave. Without power, he couldn’t run espresso machines and had to keep refrigerators shut to keep the contents – especially milk – as cold as possible. He lamented workers would lose a day of work.
At Black & Gold, a home goods and vintage shop on Valencia Street, an outage on the Saturday before Christmas was “devastating” for business, said the manager Sam, who asked not to use his last name. A similar outage occurred around the same time last year, but it was earlier in the day and allowed him to prepare with flashlights, batteries and electric candles.
“I literally didn’t think it would happen again this year,” Sam said. “This is so shocking to me.”
Voices carrying on with Christmas carols floated from a Richmond stoop. The Billow family launched into a boisterous rendition of “Let it Snow” while patriarch Mike Billow and his daughter Bliss Billow strummed a ukulele and banjo, respectively.
“We’re stuck in the dark,” Said Mike Billow, who noted that he hadn’t seen the power go out for this long since the 1989 Loma Prieta take out power for a full day. “It’s too dark to play board games, you can’t read, you can’t do much of anything.”
“But ukuleles don’t take batteries,” Bliss Billow said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
This article originally published at PG&E outages in S.F. expected to be resolved overnight as 42,000 customers still without power.