A major power outage hit San Francisco, leaving 130,000 PG&E customers or roughly 30% of the city blanketed in darkness on a rainy Saturday amid the busy holiday season. <\/p>\n
The outage started in the morning, but a fire that broke out inside a PG&E power substation around 2:15 p.m. in the Mission District played a role in the blackouts, according to the San Francisco Fire Department. The fire was under control by 4:24 p.m. and the cause is still unknown.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m comfortable saying it\u2019s a contributing factor to the power outages, but I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s the entire reason as to why,\u201d said SFFD Lt. Mariano Elias.<\/p>\n
The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management posted a map showing the outage heavily affected the west side of the city. The most affected areas include Richmond, Sunset, Presidio and Golden Gate Park.<\/p>\n
PG&E hasn\u2019t said publicly what caused the outage. It disrupted public transportation including BART trains. BART said that the stations at Powell Street and Civic Center were closed because of the outage<\/a> and that trains in San Francisco were experiencing a 10-minute delay.<\/p>\n By 7 p.m., service had been restored at the stations. The Muni and Central Subway systems were not running<\/a> but also restored power<\/a> later.<\/p>\n The large outage during the pre-Christmas weekend comes as more rainy weather is expected to hit San Francisco and then move toward Los Angeles<\/a> ahead of Christmas Day. Weather authorities expect an 80% chance of more than 2 inches of rain in downtown Los Angeles by Christmas from the Pineapple Express storm that was hitting San Francisco on Saturday.<\/p>\n On social media, people in San Francisco posted about businesses losing power, getting stuck in traffic, and self-driving Waymo vehicles apparently stalled<\/a> at dark intersections<\/a>.<\/p>\n Waymo paused its ride-hailing service in San Francisco on Saturday.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have temporarily suspended our ride-hailing services given the broad power outage in San Francisco,\u201d Suzanne Philion, a spokesperson for Waymo, said in a statement. \u201cWe are focused on keeping our riders safe and ensuring emergency personnel have the clear access they need to do their work.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cWe have stabilized the grid and are not expecting additional customer outages at this time,\u201d the utility said<\/a>. <\/p>\n San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie<\/a> said in a video that city officials are working with PG&E to restore power and urged residents to stay home if possible. \u201cWhat I\u2019m asking everybody to do is to be safe out in the roads. A lot of lights are out. We are going to continue to keep you posted,\u201d Lurie said in the video<\/a>.<\/p>\n The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management said on X that people in the city should avoid nonessential travel; call 911 only for life threatening emergencies rather than reporting power outages; turn off major appliances to prevent surges in electricity; keep fridges and freezers closed; and treat traffic signals that go dark as four-way stops.<\/p>\n The department also cautioned people from using gas stoves, grills and generators indoors because power outages can increase the risks of carbon monoxide exposure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A major power outage hit San Francisco, leaving 130,000 PG&E customers or roughly 30% of the city blanketed…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":461635,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[210607,1582,276,2451,24071,23748,5025,114744,40808,2961,224,2444,5337,210605,17820,210604,210603,56253,86973,210606],"class_list":{"0":"post-461634","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-bart-train","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-city","12":"tag-electricity","13":"tag-emergency-management","14":"tag-fire","15":"tag-golden-gate-park","16":"tag-holiday-season","17":"tag-la","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-los-angeles-times","20":"tag-losangeles","21":"tag-major-power-outage","22":"tag-p-m","23":"tag-pge-customer","24":"tag-san-francisco-outage","25":"tag-sunset","26":"tag-utility","27":"tag-x-people"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115756070676546385","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}