PG&E executives faced some very pointed questions at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors public hearing Thursday.
The board held a public hearing to dig deeper into the power station fire and blackout that left a third of San Francisco in the dark on the weekend before Christmas.
Some customers remained without power for days.
PG&E executives began the hearing by saying sorry.
“During the busiest weekend of the holiday season, our customers and the information we provided were at times inaccurate and inconsistent. This was unacceptable,” Sarah Yoell, PG&E government relations manager, said.
As she mentioned, on that night customers were getting updates on power restoration, but those updates were wrong.
Thursday, executives revealed that it was because the two-year-old artificial intelligence program the company uses to send out those notifications fell short of its programming.
Now they plan to have a dedicated team that will override the AI.
The fire department also confirmed it took more than an hour for PG&E to call them after the fire started at the south of market substation, and when fire teams arrived, PG&E had some trouble accurately conveying where the fire might be inside the massive concrete substation.
“A lot of the building plans that PG&E was able to have on site were paper. And we were out in the rain looking at paper plans.” SF Fire Deputy Chief Patrick Rabbitt said.
A PG&E executive said that moving forward, the company will begin moving those plans to tablets within the next month.
Supervisor Bilal Mahmoud was one of the members of the board who called for this hearing. He was less than satisfied with the responses from PG&E.
“I think it’s very clear that they were unprepared. They were unprepared for the incident happening, and they’re still unprepared going forward.” Mahmoud said.
At one point, Mahmoud sparred with PG&E CEO Sumeet Singh over improvements the company says it’s made at the substation after another fire a decade earlier.
Singh promised the company would improve its communications with the emergency responders, the public, and work to prevent another event like this.
The cause of this fire still hasn’t been released – that’s because there’s an independent group that’s working on that assessment. And when it’s released, supervisors are already planning a second hearing so they can ask PG&E executives about that.