PG&E executives faced some very pointed questions at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors public hearing Thursday.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Some customers remained without power for days.<\/p>\n
PG&E executives began the hearing by saying sorry.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring the busiest weekend of the holiday season, our customers and the information we provided were at times inaccurate and inconsistent. This was unacceptable,\u201d Sarah Yoell, PG&E government relations manager, said.<\/p>\n
As she mentioned, on that night customers were getting updates on power restoration, but those updates were wrong.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now they plan to have a dedicated team that will override the AI.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
A PG&E executive said that moving forward, the company will begin moving those plans to tablets within the next month.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Singh promised the company would improve its communications with the emergency responders, the public, and work to prevent another event like this.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PG&E executives faced some very pointed questions at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors public hearing Thursday. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176060,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-176059","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-san-francisco","9":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","10":"tag-san-francisco-news","11":"tag-sf","12":"tag-sf-headlines","13":"tag-sf-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176059","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=176059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}