Photo by Kiai
Late Sunday morning, a transformer blew on an electrical pole at California and 25th Avenue. The pole caught fire briefly, but no one was injured and no lines fell to the street.
Many buildings in the immediate vicinity lost power for a few hours.
The intersection was closed off to traffic, allowing PG&E crews to repair the transformer. They worked from approximately 11:45am until 2pm. Power was restored at 2:10pm.
It’s unclear if the problem was caused by weather or something else. Early on Sunday, @sf_emergency tweeted, “Multiple power poles sparking in city due to rain.,” including one near UCSF Hospital on Parnassus.
Thanks to readers for their tip and photos.
Sarah B.
Photo by Kiai
I drove by between 10:00 and 10:30 not California was blocked at 24th and 25th was closed at Lake.
Good ol’ PG&E…took another hour plus for them to actually get a truck out to perform repairs.
Boooooooo to PG&E.
Yep… This also really disrupted the 1 California line for quite a long time – I waited for a bus for 20 minutes, called Nextbus, who told me all predictions were off and that they were running shuttles between 6th and “the beach”. Nuts!
Many years ago PG&E *used* to have an emergency crew on standby for events like this. Now they say they don’t have the money or need to divert the money somewhere else for whatever reason.
But they DO have the money to put commercials on the air touting how they’re working on safety and are such a responsible company……
Full of s**t
Many years ago, PG&E regularly cleaned lines where there were connections so that outages would not happen. All this preventive maintenance went out the window when deregulation started and Enron began gaming power prices. To ensure continuing dividends, all maintenance was severely curtailed which increased forest fires and outages. On filing for bankruptcy over a decade ago, all liabilities were placed on ratepayers while assets went to management and shareholders. It has continued in this fashion ever since they completed recapitalization and restructuring of their balance sheet.
I lost power for less than 20 minutes following Loma Prieta.
Firetrucks were there at 9:45am to block off 25th Avenue. They cut my power out at 11:45am but PG&E didn’t show up till 1pm. My power was out till 6:30pm!!