Nearly one-third of San Francisco went dark on Saturday in a power outage that began in the morning and knocked out electricity in more and more neighborhoods as the day wore on.
At least 124,000 out of 414,000 customers were without power as of Saturday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.com and Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility that serves the city. The outage cut power to a large swath of neighborhoods in the northern half of the city, including the Richmond and Sunset districts, through Haight Ashbury and all the way into downtown, according to a PG&E map of the city, with electricity outages indicated in red.
Firefighters were putting out a fire at a PG&E substation in the middle of the city and urging residents to avoid the area, the San Francisco Fire Department wrote on social media on Saturday afternoon.
PG&E said in a statement on X that it was working with emergency crews and city officials to resolve the outage, but it provided no further details and did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It said that it had stabilized the grid and was not expecting additional outages at this time. (The utility said 130,000 customers were without power, though maps on its website and PowerOutage.com showed that several thousand fewer had been affected.)
Residents received notifications that it could be hours until their power was restored. The outage proved frustrating to San Franciscans who were gathering and shopping on the last weekend before the Christmas holiday. Stores and restaurants were also struggling to conduct transactions without their electronic payment systems in the tech-driven city.
This is a breaking news development. Please check back for updates.
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