Nearly three months after a Pacific Gas & Electric blackout wreaked havoc during a holiday weekend in San Francisco, city officials are calling for an investigation into the incident, which left 137,000 residents without power. <\/p>\n
In a letter sent to PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe dated March 12, the city said it has \u201cdeep concern\u201d about the reliability and safety of the utility company\u2019s services in light of the blackout, which was caused by a Dec. 20 fire at a Mission substation, and says it will ask the California Public Utilities Commission to probe the power outage. <\/p>\n
Shortly after the blackout, the CPUC said (opens in new tab)<\/a> it had initiated an investigation. But there has been no indication that the probe is underway, according to the city attorney\u2019s office. <\/p>\n In a statement, the state regulator said otherwise: \u201cThe CPUC\u2019s staff investigation into the PG&E December 2025 outages remains in progress.\u201d<\/p>\n The March 12 letter reads in part, \u201cThe fire and outages threatened public health and safety and caused significant personal and economic hardship for San Francisco\u2019s residents, businesses, and public services. \u2026 We understand that PG&E is still gathering information about exactly what happened and why, and we look forward to reviewing that important information. But given the history of outages and substation fires in San Francisco, we believe that more must be done.\u201d<\/p>\n The letter was signed by Mayor Daniel Lurie, City Attorney David Chiu, Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman, and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission General Manager Dennis Herrera. <\/p>\n A spokesperson for PG&E did not respond to a request for comment. <\/p>\n The letter states that the Dec. 20 blackout had a negative economic impact on the city, occurring during the holiday season, \u201cwhen stores and restaurants would have been filled with shoppers and diners.\u201d <\/p>\n It also states that PG&E has a history of blackouts in the city, including fires in 1996, 2003, and 2005 at the same Mission substation that caused the Dec. 20 outage. Blackouts in December 1998 and December 2003 caused public health and safety threats and economic harm, the city contends. <\/p>\n There have also been more recent blackouts: Outages in April 2023 in Chinatown and other neighborhoods were caused by an explosion at a PG&E site near Clay and Montgomery Streets. And outages in 2021 and 2022 affected San Francisco\u2019s 911 call center, forcing the city to pay for a backup power system. <\/p>\n The city states that PG&E has failed to communicate \u201caccurate and timely\u201d information about these blackout incidents and described the utility\u2019s claims process as \u201cconfusing and burdensome.\u201d <\/p>\n The letter follows a scathing hearing in February, during which supervisors excoriated PG&E\u2019s other CEO, Sumeet Singh<\/a>, about the response to the December blackout. During the Feb. 12 hearing, Singh stated that Lurie had directed the utility to prioritize resources for the opera house<\/a>, though he quickly recanted that statement. <\/p>\n The squabble over the December blackout comes as efforts are underway to have the city split from PG&E and create its own public power infrastructure, a move that has been in the works for decades by the utility\u2019s critics. In February, state Sen. Scott Wiener introduced a bill<\/a> that would give cities more power to separate from PG&E. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, a petition by the city to the CPUC is calculating the value of the utility company\u2019s assets in San Francisco. The Planning Department is working on an analysis about public power, and a report is expected next month. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly three months after a Pacific Gas & Electric blackout wreaked havoc during a holiday weekend in San…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218843,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[14047,636,14421,3604,5653,52993,21973,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-218842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-california-public-utilities-commission","tag-daniel-lurie","tag-david-chiu","tag-pge","tag-power-outages","tag-public-utilities-commission","tag-rafael-mandelman","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218842","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=218842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}