Four takeaways on PG&E’s ‘unacceptable’ response to massive S.F. blackouts

During a roughly three-hour hearing, executives from PG&E answered tough questions Thursday from supervisors about a massive power outage in late December that left more than 130,000 people in the dark at its peak. PG&E’s handling of the blackout renewed calls for the city to take over power infrastructure in the city and prompted officials to call for accountability. 

The blackout, the third in the last three decades stemming from a single Mission Street substation, was caused by a faulty circuit breaker that triggered a fire. The severity of the damage to the building and equipment inside made it hard for the utility to get customers in the Richmond and Sunset districts back online, executives said. Some San Franciscans were without electricity for 66 hours, according to city officials. 

Here’s what else we know about what went wrong:

Communications broke down between the city and PG&E 

Mary Ellen Carroll, the executive director of the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management, told supervisors that the city found out about the power outage from its own monitoring system and was not notified immediately by PG&E. 

She and other city officials leapt into action. But it took multiple hours for the dedicated PG&E liaison with the city to arrive on scene, Carroll said, and the liaison was dispatched only after the city requested it. Even after that person arrived at the site around 3 p.m., the problems continued. 

“Within PG&E, it was clear there [were] issues with communications within the organization,” Carroll said. 

She emphasized that she and other city leaders have a “great relationship” with the liaison but added that “if he is not connected within his organization, if he does not have information within a timely manner, if he is not getting accurate information, then that is where we have a problem.” 

“We saw instances of that during this event,” she added. 

AI gave residents inaccurate power-restoration ETAs 

Inaccurate and shifting estimates from PG&E about when power would be restored was a major frustration for San Franciscans who lost power. 

Sumeet Singh, the head of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., told supervisors that artificial intelligence was to blame. The utility relied on a new AI-powered model to evaluate how long it would take for workers to get the system back online. 

“The complexity of the incident created a challenge to understand the extent of the damage and how long restoration would take place,” he said. 

That’s because the tool is trained with data that goes back just three years, Singh said. It’s mostly accurate for small, local outages caused by distribution problems but proved unable to comprehend the kind of sweeping disaster that struck when an entire substation was taken offline. 

“This was unacceptable and the impact it had on our customers and their frustration is not lost on us,” Singh said.

The response seemed to mystify Supervisor Bilal Mahmood during the hearing at the public safety committee and who remarked that the system seemed to be a case of “garbage in, garbage out.” 

Problems at the same substation had caused power outages twice before, in 2003 and 1996, and Mahmood asked why data on those blackouts had not been included in the AI’s training model. 

That is something the utility is working on, Singh replied, with the help of an outside group contracted to help improve the tool. He also said the utility had created a “rapid escalation” team of actual humans who will step in to override the AI and provide more nuanced communications to customers in large-scale blackouts going forward.  

Paper maps hampered firefighters

The fire at the substation broke out a little after 1 p.m. and the blaze wasn’t fully suppressed until around 6:30 p.m., according to a timeline presented at the hearing by PG&E officials. 

Patrick Rabbitt, the chief of operations at the San Francisco Fire Department, told supervisors that the department was called in to fight the fire at 2 p.m. The size of the building and the dangerous electrical equipment inside made the fire difficult to fight, he said. The four-story substation was filled with smoke and had to be vented. 

To make matters worse, Rabbitt said, the building plans that could have helped firefighters navigate the structure had not been digitized.  

“It was a rainy day, if you remember, and a lot of the building plans that PG&E was able to have on site were paper,” he said. “And we were out in the rain looking at paper plans.” 

He recommended that the utility make digital copies of the plans stored on tablets to help in future incidents, something that high rise commercial buildings typically have on hand. 

Singh said he couldn’t speak to why the plans had not been digitized or whether other substations’ plans existed only on paper. 

Equity questions go unanswered 

Mahmood drilled into Singh about why some neighborhoods had power restored and received more outreach from PG&E than others. His most vulnerable constituents, including older adults, people with medical needs and low-income residents of Single Residence Occupancy hotels, should have been the first to be served by power restoration efforts and temporary measures to support San Franciscans during the outage, Mahmood said. 

“The most critical customers from our perspective … were the last to get power,” he said. 

Singh countered that the city should be responsible for designating the highest-priority locations for power restoration. The utility maintains a list of addresses that includes hospitals, wastewater treatment facilities as well as fire and police stations. Those facilities were prioritized during the outage, Singh said, adding that the company recently updated the list in coordination with city officials. 

Mahmood also pressed Singh to explain why a community resource center had been established in the Richmond district but not in the area around the Civic Center until his own office asked for one. 

Singh said it is the city’s responsibility to decide which areas would be best served by and able to accommodate such a center. 

Carroll, the Emergency Management director, said she had to ask PG&E to set up the Richmond resource center and that the utility had not proactively volunteered to do so.  

“One of our follow up items and discussions is, what we can expect from PG&E as far as supports for residents,” she said.