Some 125,000 homes and businesses in San Francisco were without power on Saturday from a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. power outage that affected about a third of the city.
PG&E said power should start to go back online later in the day. “We do expect restorations later this evening,” company spokesperson Tamar Sarkissian said in an online video at 8:30 p.m.
About 90,000 customers had their power restored by 9 p.m., the company wrote, and the rest could expect electricity again “overnight.”
Additional blackouts were not expected, PG&E wrote.
The full PG&E outage map showed vast swaths of the city without electricity going into the evening, but power returned as the night wore on. Tens of thousands lost electricity in the Sunset, Richmond, Haight-Ashbury, Chinatown, South of Market and other neighborhoods.
The utility company said 125,558 customers were affected at 5:41 p.m. It said 30.3 percent of its customers in San Francisco were without power.
“We are working with first responders and city officials on an outage in San Francisco affecting approximately 130,000 customers,” PG&E wrote online. “We have stabilized the grid, and are not expecting additional customer outages at this time.”
The outage appeared related to a fire that struck a PG&E substation at Eight and Mission streets a little after 2 p.m. Fire department video showed two engines extending their ladders up to the roof of the building, and more than a dozen firefighters below.
Sarkissian stood in front of that substation on Saturday evening and said the utility had “crews inside right now working to restore power to our customers.”
BART said its Powell Street and Civic Center stations were closed as of 5 p.m. Muni advised that there were numerous train delays and told Central Subway customers to consider taking the bus.
Waymos across the city were incapacitated, causing traffic snarls, according to multiple videos posted online. By 7:21 p.m., Waymo had halted its services across San Francisco.
In the Inner Sunset, people were out and about, holding flashlights. Stores were closed along Irving Street, and groups of men working in restaurant kitchens left work early, chatting at the bus stop or riding off on their scooters.
Additional reporting by Junyao Yang.
Wondering if the blackout started on 9th and Irving in Inner Sunset. Tartine and others had outages starting around 1:15pm and the streetlights were out. A firetruck was on the scene to check it out but there did not seem to be a fire.