Around 4:30pm on Wednesday afternoon, roughly 1,600 PG&E customers lost power in the inner Richmond. This was the second outage in a week, with the last one occurring on June 1 in the late evening.
Initially, PG&E predicted that power would be restored around 7:15pm, but they were able to get the lights back on for most customers by 6pm.
While most residents weren’t home to experience it, many of the merchants on Clement from Arguello to 6th Avenue tried their best to operate in the dark.
Green Apple Books was readying the store for a special event with Google on eBooks, and tweeted “15 minutes before our eBook petting zoo the power goes put? Damn you, Amazon! How do you do it?” Even after the power came back on at 6pm, Green Apple was still experiencing intermittent outages, later tweeting “Come learn how to buy an ebook by the light of your ipad so you can read post-apocalypse! (Seriously, this is what’s happening.)”
In an extremely rare event, Giorgio’s Pizza was closed last night when I strolled by at 8:30pm. Their power was back on but they had probably made the decision to close when the outage went too long.
There was also a minor traffic snarl thanks to the outage when the stoplights went out at the intersection of Park Presidio and Clement. When I drove by at 7pm, SFPD was still directing traffic. One RichmondSFBlog reader, Mark, reported that the lights were still down as of 10:40pm.
And this morning, I noticed a few PG&E trucks and a backup generator on the corner of 12th and Clement, probably powering the intersection at Park Presidio.
No word yet on what caused the outage or if it was related to the one on June 1, which PG&E attributed to “an underground equipment failure”. That outage affected roughly twice the number of homes as ysterday’s.
Did you experience the power outage? Leave a comment to let us know.
Sarah B.
The power fritzed out again around 6 PM. I was at Kamei when it went out, and the woman at the counter just shrugged and said, “CASH ONLY!”
As I walked down the street, most of the merchants on Clement were standing out side, barring people from going in to the stores. The street was very quiet.
New May Wah was pitch black inside, and people who had just bagged up veggies and fruit were stuck for a few minutes while NMW figured out what to do.
When I got home it looked like the power had gone out earlier – the stove and microwave clocks were off, and blinking.
the power went out again thursday night around 10PM for a short time due to equipment failure again. This was the third time in less than 1 week. I hope PG&E fixed the problem for good this time.