Power has been restored to the bulk of the 130,000 homes and businesses in San Francisco affected by a massive outage that caused major disruptions in the US city.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s outage map showed more than 20,000 customers still remained without electricity as of Sunday morning – about 16 hours after the problem began – while crews worked to fully restore service.
The outage, which occurred shortly after 1pm on Saturday, left a large swath of the northern part of the city without power that began to grow in size.
At its peak, the outage represented roughly one-third of the utility company’s customers in the city.
Mayor Daniel Lurie asked residents on X to stay home if they could and to use flashlights instead of candles for safety reasons.
Social media posts and local media reported mass closures of restaurants and shops and darkened street lights and Christmas decorations on Saturday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year.
The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management said on X there were “significant transit disruptions” happening citywide and urged residents to avoid non-essential travel and treat traffic lights as four-way stops.
Waymo, the operator of driverless ride-hailing vehicles, suspended its services.
At least one video posted on social media appeared to show a Waymo vehicle stopped in the middle of an intersection.
Some of the outages were caused by a fire that broke out inside a PG&E substation at 8th and Mission streets, fire officials posted on X about 3.15pm.
The full cause remained under investigation.
At 4pm, PG&E posted on X that it had stabilised the grid and no further outages were expected.
with DPA
Australian Associated Press is the beating heart of Australian news. AAP is Australia’s only independent national newswire and has been delivering accurate, reliable and fast news content to the media industry, government and corporate sector for 85 years. We keep Australia informed.
