Power Failures Darken San Francisco
Pastor Dale Morgan
Power Failures Darken San Francisco*
Wednesday July 25, 2007 3:01 AM
By LISA LEFF
Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Sporadic power failures Tuesday afternoon darkened
a broad swath of downtown, an area dotted with Internet companies whose
servers rely on a steady supply of electricity.
About 51,000 homes and businesses in San Francisco and south of the city
lacked electricity at the height of the failure, which started at about
2 p.m. and lasted a few hours, said Pacific Gas & Electric spokeswoman
Darlene Chiu.
Many were rerouted to backup circuits as PG&E crews worked to identify
the failure's cause, Chiu said.
Transmission line breakers failed in a substation, she said. The
failures were due to power surges from PG&E's attempts to keep
electricity flowing through the substation, she said.
``Every single time we tried to restore service, multiple times, then it
impacts the system and the outages occur,'' Chiu said.
Power was restored throughout the city by 5 p.m., she said.
AT&T Park, home of the Giants, was also affected hours before a
scheduled night game. The city's famed cable cars were out of commission
for a time.
Six Apart Inc., a blog-hosting service, said its sites began failing
shortly before 2 p.m., and the company sent an e-mail to customers
blaming the city's ``power issues.'' The company reported that power
resumed shortly afterward, but that employees were checking data and
computers.
Several other Internet sites with offices in San Francisco had problems
Tuesday afternoon, including Technorati, Yelp, Red Envelope and CNet. It
was unclear whether the problems were related to the outage.
San Francisco-based Linden Labs, which operates the popular virtual
world Second Life, blamed the failure for sapping power from its data
center.
San Francisco-based classified site Craigslist.org was down Tuesday
afternoon, but founder Craig Newmark said he didn't know why.
Bay Area Rapid Transit trains were operating normally, though one
downtown station was running on backup batteries, a BART spokesman said.
The San Francisco Police Department said it had not received additional
calls related to the problem.
Gregg Fishman, a spokesman for California's Independent System Operator,
which manages the state's power grid, said there had been no reports of
widespread failures outside San Francisco.
``There's nothing that we know of on our system that would affect San
Francisco,'' Fishman said.
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Associated Press writers Rachel Konrad and Michael Liedtke in San
Francisco contributed to this report.