San Francisco power outage affecting thousands of PG&E customers fully restored

By Jose Fabian

An unexpected power outage in San Francisco affected almost 9,400 customers Saturday morning, according to PG&E.

The number of customers who lost power unexpectedly was 8,422, with 238 without power due to planned maintenance, the utility company’s outage map states. Those without power were located in the Presidio, Richmond, Sea Cliff, Golden Gate Park and Panhandle neighborhoods.

San Francisco fire crews were called to Anza Street for reports of high-voltage wires arcing, a spokesperson said, but they were not sure if it was the cause of the power outage.

The power outage was reported just before 10 a.m., according to PG&E’s outage map. In a statement, PG&E said, “This morning, around 9:45 am, during a routine operational procedure between two San Francisco substations, protective device on the system activated and there was an outage.”

As of 4:02 p.m., power had been restored to all affected customers, PG&E said. Crews were able to restore service to all but about 2,500 customers by 12:10 p.m. before completing repairs later in the afternoon.

The utility company said about 120,000 customers received a power outage notification but there were never that many people without power.

“Due to the fact that two circuits were impacted, the outage notification system rolled up to a larger protective device, which indicated 120,000 customers were without power. That was not correct,” PG&E said.

PG&E said the incorrect notification was caused when data transmitted between its SmartMeter systems and outage management system mistakenly indicated a much larger outage than had actually occurred. System operators identified the error and corrected it, and the utility said it will investigate the issue to ensure future outage communications are timely and accurate.

The utility also said it will continue investigating the cause of the outage.