{"id":175982,"date":"2026-02-13T03:13:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T03:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/175982\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T03:13:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T03:13:10","slug":"san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-grills-pge-officials-about-mass-outage-last-december-demanding-accountability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/175982\/","title":{"rendered":"San Francisco Board of Supervisors grills PG&E officials about mass outage last December, demanding accountability"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — San Francisco supervisors are demanding answers about what caused the widespread PG&E power outages that impacted businesses and residents back in December. A hearing was held on Thursday.<\/p>\n

“I want to be very clear that we take responsibility for the outage last December. Our response was unacceptable,” said PG&E CEO Sameet Singh.<\/p>\n

Singh’s apology stems from the Dec. 20 outage caused by a substation fire, which cut power to a third of San Francisco — some for over three days.<\/p>\n

“One hundred thirty thousand customers lost power during one of the biggest weekends of the year,” Singh said.<\/p>\n

The hearing was a fact-finding mission by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to get answers about why the outage happened and what took PG&E so long to get the power back on, especially to underserved neighborhoods around Civic Center.<\/p>\n

MORE: SF small business owners file class action lawsuit against PG&E after December outages<\/a><\/p>\n

“The equity of the response is clear: they don’t have protocol in place to ensure there’s an equitable response in San Francisco. We’re holding them accountable,” said Supervisor Bilal Mahmood.<\/p>\n

PG&E said a fire at its Mission Substation, caused by a circuit breaker, was first detected at 1:04 p.m., but the utility didn’t notify the fire department until 2:30 p.m. At 6:30 p.m., crews were able to enter the building to begin power restoration.<\/p>\n

“We had to de-energize other substations. Because the electric system is inter-connected, so we had to put that substation on an island, so it was isolated and safe for first responders,” Singh said.<\/p>\n

The city says there was confusion.<\/p>\n

“Hospitals were on generators, Fire had to modify its response,” said Mary Ellen Carroll, Director of SF Emergency Services.<\/p>\n

MORE: PG&E customers still waiting on December outage payments amid more San Francisco outages this week<\/a><\/p>\n

The fire department said the only maps it had for the substation were on old school paper.<\/p>\n

“We’re in the 21st century and PG&E is still on paper? these are clear indications it’s struggling to meet the needs of SF during an emergency response,” Mahmood said.<\/p>\n

The utility is vowing to do better by upgrading its map and notification system and committing to work with the city to change its internal procedures and protocols.<\/p>\n

The supervisors will schedule another hearing in a few months to get a progress report from PG&E.<\/p>\n

\"Now<\/a><\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2026 KGO-TV. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — San Francisco supervisors are demanding answers about what caused the widespread PG&E power outages…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175983,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[83839,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-175982","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-83839","9":"tag-san-francisco","10":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","11":"tag-san-francisco-news","12":"tag-sf","13":"tag-sf-headlines","14":"tag-sf-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}