In San Francisco on Saturday, yet another power outage left more than 6,000 homes and businesses in the dark. Saturday also marks one week since a widespread outage following a substation fire left around 130,000 customers in the city without power.
Frustration with PG&E continues to build in San Francisco, as do calls for change to stop service failures like this in the city.
On Saturday, PG&E confirmed that at 11:10 a.m., around 6,050 customers lost power in San Francisco. The PG&E outage map at the time showed the impacted neighborhoods as the northern part of the Sunset and Golden Gate Park.
PG&E said power was restored for all customers at 2:11 p.m. Saturday. The utility said it is still investigating the cause of the Saturday outage.
Newly-appointed San Francisco Supervisor Alan Wong said Saturday’s outage marks the fifth power outage this month in the Sunset. Wong said the district experienced outages on December 7, 10, and 20, as well as another outage earlier this week, plus the outage on Saturday.
“The Sunset District is sick and tired of all these outages. Can PG&E just get its act together?” Wong wondered outloud as he described the outages as “disappointing” and “disruptive.”
Wong has called for PG&E to have a public hearing with the city, and he is also directing city staff to provide information on what can be done to increase accountability when it comes to delivering electricity.
“My priorities will be Number One: being able to get answers for what happened, why have we faced so many outages — it’s ridiculous — Number Two: how can we prevent this going forward into the future?” Wong said.
He also noted that many small businesses in his district have had difficulty figuring out the process for filing claims for the damages they incurred during the outages. Wong said the process has been particularly difficult for small business employees whose first language is not English.
Wong’s remarks are part of the mounting criticism of PG&E in the wake of last week’s major outage in the city.
Some leaders have been calling for San Francisco to break up with PG&E entirely. State Senator Scott Weiner, who is also running for Congress, said he will soon announce new legislation that would allow cities like San Francisco to form their own publicly-formed utilities.
In downtown San Francisco on Saturday, a few dozen people gathered for a rally, calling for PG&E to stop rate hikes and for PG&E to be turned into a public utility statewide.
“We’re saying that there’s no reason for this anymore, when PG&E makes so much money that they should invest in their equipment and make sure that we’re all safe,” said Ramsey Robinson, one of the organizers of the rally on Saturday. Robinson said the people behind the rally would like to see the utility owned by ratepayers and workers.
Meanwhile, in the Richmond District, where some residents were without power for two days last week, seven large generators continue humming loudly at the corner of 24th Avenue and Balboa. PG&E said it brought in those generators on December 22 to provide temporary power for customers impacted by the large outage on Saturday.
Residents nearby said that while they are grateful to have the lights and heat back on, the generators have been quite loud and made it difficult to sleep. One neighbor told NBC Bay Area that PG&E had offered to put her up in a hotel room for the time being, but she declined because the hotel room is too far from where she needs to go for work.
Many residents on the western side of the city told NBC Bay Area they want to see change.
“It was frustrating, a huge inconvenience, especially with how high the rates are,” said Inner Sunset resident Maxwell Eberitzsch, who lost power for much of the day on December 20.
He noted that the outages add insult to injury with PG&E’s recent rate increases.
Eberitzsch said he is not opposed to seeing San Francisco turn to a public utility for its power.
“I think yes, it would be a good idea for some kind of change that makes it better,” he said.