San Francisco Wants Answers From PG&E After Latest Outage

S.F. Wants Answers From PG&E After Latest Outage
Newsom's Office Says They'll Hold PG&E Accountable
By Heather Ishimaru
ABC7NEWS.com

SAN FRANCISCO, Jul. 25, 2007 (KGO) - The city of San Francisco is not letting PG&E off the hook. The city wants answers and better reliability. Utility executives and city officials sat down to talk about why San Francisco has experienced so many power outages of late.

San Francisco has been closely watching PG&E's reliability since the beginning of this year. They are no longer depending on the power company to keep track of outages. The city is keeping track as well, and say there's been 224 outages between January and June, 124 of which were unplanned. San Francisco says PG&E will now be spending a lot of time and money getting to the bottom of yesterday's outage.

The power outage caused AT&T Park to go dark for a few hours, cable cars stopped on the tracks, streetlights went out, and workers received an unexpected afternoon off when their computers went down.

Lee Greenberg, Consultant: "The power went off and then it came back on. And just as I started to get some work done the power went off, and then it came back on. And then just as I got my computer up and started to work the power went off."

San Francisco city officials summoned PG&E executives to city hall Wednesday morning.

Ed Lee, San Francisco City Administrator "We have so many businesses, so many acute operations, be it health-wise, be it business-wise, be it tourism. We can't afford to have these outages at the number we're experiencing. So we have to have more reliability."

Nancy McFadden/PG&E: "Safety and reliability are their utmost concerns. And that yesterday's series of outages are unacceptable. And we completely agree. "

PG&E says its still investigating, but it knows that malfunctioning circuit breakers at this Daly City substation triggered a chain reaction that destroyed an underground transformer in the 500-block of mission in san Francisco.

The outage effected 50,000 customers for about two hours. It was a wake-up call for businesses with backup generators, since many did not work.

When 365 Main Street lost power, a building that houses computer servers, major internet operations like Craigslist and Red Envelope, went offline.

PG&E says it was out taking second and third looks at the equipment until 1:30 Wednesday morning. The city says it appears PG&E is not trying to make any excuses.

"I believe that the executives here for the company are acting in a highly responsible way and giving us the information we need," said Lee.

The city says it will be getting daily reports from PG&E on the progress on the investigation into yesterday's outage. A third party will be brought in to verify the findings.