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Power outage Sunday night, disappointing Downton Abbey fans

Posted on by Sarah B.


“Massive power outage right in the middle of the Downton Abbey season finale!”
– posted on Facebook by reader Cheryl S.

Around 10:15pm on Sunday night, right in the middle of the Downton Abbey season 4 finale, we received our first report of a power outage in the outer Richmond District.

Reports via twitter came from 15th Avenue, 18th Avenue, 22nd Avenue – all the way up to 30th Avenue.

At 10:31pm, PG&E tweeted “Richmond SF outage, affecting 6700 customers. Crew on-scene, working to determine cause. Will update with ETOR when available.”

We’ve received no other news from PG&E on the cause of the outage, and the estimate we’ve seen is that power should be restored between midnight and 1am. At 11:35pm, PGE4ME tweeted:

For continuing updates, follow PGE4ME on Twitter or call their hotline at 800-743-5002.

Were you in the dark? Leave a comment to let us know where you are and for how long you were living by candlelight on Sunday night.

Sarah B.

UPDATE Monday 12:22am: We received our first report of power being restored from Supervisor Eric Mar:

UPDATE Monday 12:43am: PG&E reporting that 1,300+ customers are still out:

UPDATE Monday morning: One reader said that as of 6am, they were still without power. And at 8:20am, power was reported to be out again at 14th and California.

UPDATE Monday 8:58am: PG&E reports that two customers remain on generator power, but the rest are with power again. They attributed the cause of the outage to a “failed underground cable & failed overhead connector”:

19 Comments

  1. PG&E is telling my office that 80% of the affected Richmond District customers should have their power restored within the next 20 minutes. Please let us know if you haven’t gotten your power on by midnight.

  2. The De Young Museum is going crazy with Klaxons and automated messages. We had half power for about ten minutes and now it’s out again. Thanks, Obama!

  4. My power is still out and PG&E is saying my area of the inner Richmond now will be restored by 1am. “Crews are repairing x-1108 circuit, approx 20 min, have restored some customers on first outage and remaining customers should be done before 1am. “

  5. No outage here and am on one of the named Avenues. x-1108 doesn’t mean anything, are there geographical coordinates?

  6. Glad power is back.. I was walking home down Geary with it off, and it was scary. Every intersection from/including Park Presidio to 20th Ave was out. Park Presidio had a huge police presence with flares and several police cars to direct traffic, but every other intersection was left alone. I walked through all 7 blocks of dark intersections and never once saw a single car stop. A handful (<10%) would slow down to 10mph or so, but most stayed at their normal 30mph+… It was impossible to cross the street until 21st Ave (where the traffic light was on).

    I understand that police resources were stretched a little thin on this, but I'd like to think even throwing a couple flares into the intersections might've helped. The huge presence at Park Presidio really made the lack of anything west of it rather disappointing. I find it hard to believe that none of the drivers knew that they're required to treat any traffic light that's out as a stop sign…

  7. Not unusual, in the past 20 years most drivers don’t pull over for ambulances or fire trucks/engines (two different kinds of equipment) with their sirens going. They have been ignoring stop signs for much longer. The last time I saw any deference to inoperable signals was in the hour after Loma Prieta quake, by a couple hours later most were rolling through intersections as you described.

  9. At 7th & California, we just got a momentary outage about 10:30, then it came back on….

  10. I live on 11th Ave (between Geary and Clement) – my backyard adjoins those on 10th Ave. This seems to be the dividing line for the PG&E grid/boundry. When power outages do occur, from my dark and silent apartment I can see bright lights blazing from the homes of my 10th Ave neighbors, just a few feet away.

    Pretty sure they are laughing and turning on extra lights and appliances, just to taunt those of sitting in the dark or searching for flashlights. Not that I would do something like that 🙂

  11. LOL Love the heading — I’m in that demographic. First thing I did is text a friend complaining it interrupted my show! 19th/Geary — power went out about 10:05 and didn’t come back until 12:30, although there were three attempts that didn’t stick.

  12. Will we be able to see Winter Olympics closing ceremony and/or Downtown Abbey on TV again before the unexpected PG&E power failure last night ?

    These two important TV program were “in progress” before the blackout !!

  13. We got power back just before 1 AM on 20th near Anza. Funny, Anza remained lit the whole time and random street lights remained on as well. I wasn’t watching TV, but had to get up at 4 AM to be able to finish a deadline that I had hoped to have finished at midnight the latest last night.

  14. George, you can watch both on Comcast OnDemand if you have cable. I actually re-watched the British version of the Downton finale today on iTunes, which is another option.

  15. Just some thoughts on the outage… Right after it happened, my husband and our next-door neighbor took a short walk to check out the extent of the outage. It was fun to see all the folks in the neighborhood come out in the dark, looking like fireflies with headlamps and flashlights, and we were amazed by the stars. Something about it reminded me of being a kid and playing in the dark. When we got home, we read a ghost story by candlelight then listened to an old-time radio show (on an iPhone). Yes, the outage was inconvenient, but for a short while everything slowed down and was silent and peaceful.

  16. I’m at California and Park Presidio, and my lights flickered off for 2 seconds around 10:15 but then came back on for the rest of the night. I watched out the window frequently at pitch dark Park Presidio, which still had no police at the intersection @ Calif when I went to sleep after midnight.

    As Tarniv said about Geary, cars were not even slowing down on Park Presidio, let alone stopping at the darkened intersection. There was lots of honking and brake sounds, and I’m baffled that there were no collisions. What is wrong with drivers?

  18. lol, it totally DID happen while we watched Dowton Abbey, early avenues, didn’t last but a few minutes

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