S.F. Blacked Out, Maybe by Sabotage

A massive, predawn power outage that snuffed out lights across San Francisco on Thursday, snarling traffic and wreaking havoc on the city’s morning routine, may have been the work of saboteurs.

A spokesman for Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said the utility called in the FBI and San Francisco police Thursday afternoon to determine why three banks of transformers at a key substation lost power at 6:15 a.m., cutting electricity to 127,000 customers and leaving a third of the city dark.

“They are treating the substation as a crime scene, and we believe there is a strong possibility of tampering,” said PG&E; spokesman Bill Roake.

The blackout set burglar and fire alarms ringing, police scrambling to control traffic at busy intersections and tens of thousands of San Franciscans scurrying to begin their day without lights or hot coffee.

San Francisco police said there were no reports of injuries and no serious accidents caused by the unexpected plunge into darkness.

“It wasn’t that traumatic. . . . Right now, it looks like we were dealing with somebody turning the lights out,” said San Francisco Police Officer Sherman Ackerson. “Had it gone long term, we would have had to mobilize.”

Roake said PG&E; turned to law enforcement when it found no equipment failure at the unmanned substation that could explain the outage. It is a federal crime to interrupt the function of an energy facility.

The impact of the blackout was immediate and dramatic.

From the bayside Marina district to the Sunset district five miles to the south, some San Franciscans were without power for as long as four hours.

Thousands woke up late when their clock radio alarms failed to go off. Many who made it out the door left with wet hair and unpressed clothes, only to find themselves suffering through longer-than-usual traffic jams and creeping through uncontrolled intersections.

“It was nasty,” said Officer Charles Maher, who was working in the Richmond district, where virtually every major intersection was without traffic lights for at least three hours.

Police divided their time between trying to sort out traffic jams and responding to hundreds of burglar alarms triggered by the power outage. There were no reports of looting, however, and only a handful of reported traffic accidents, most of them fender-benders, Maher said.

“By 9:30, we pretty much had it mopped up,” Maher said.

The city’s major medical centers were unaffected. Several small hospitals that lost power simply switched to emergency generators.

By the standards of a town that burned to the ground after the 1906 earthquake and that is still rebuilding after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, what happened Thursday ranked more as a headache than a disaster.

In this city known for its love of coffee, the inability to get a hot cup became a huge inconvenience for some. At one Starbucks, caffeine-deprived customers knocked on the windows pleading for coffee--even though the store was closed.

Other coffee shops that normally do a booming morning business were giving away java from samovars to bleary-eyed customers who grumbled about making do without their breakfast lattes.

“We stayed open because we want to support the community,” said Jay Mendoza, assistant manager of Peet’s Coffee and Tea in the Fillmore district. The lights went out at his coffee shop at 6:15 a.m., Mendoza said, and stayed off for three hours--a period when the store normally serves more than 200 people.

“We borrowed coffee from our other stores that still had power and gave it away to customers. We understand that people are having a rough day,” he said.

BART, the city’s subway system, kept running throughout the outage, although two downtown stations were closed briefly because they had no lights. The trains simply passed through those stations without dropping off or picking up riders. The city’s Municipal Railway also closed several underground stations during the rush-hour commute.

To ease traffic, police were deployed to some key junctures. But at others, frustrated drivers got out of their cars and directed traffic themselves.

Firefighters scrambled to check out fire alarms set off when the power began surging back in some areas about 9 a.m., said Greg Owyang, a San Francisco Fire Department administrative officer.

“We were very, very busy this morning,” Owyang said, but because the outage happened so early, “at least we didn’t have anyone stuck in downtown elevators.”

Perhaps the most frazzled were working parents with school-age children. There was no early morning television to divert the young ones, no electric stoves to heat their oatmeal, no microwaves or toasters to warm their bagels.

Some parents left their homes to cruise the streets, searching for restaurants with working kitchens.

Families besieged Miz Brown’s Feedbag, an old-fashioned diner in the upscale Laurel Heights neighborhood that usually caters to an older crowd in the early weekday mornings and tends to see families mainly for weekend breakfasts.

“It was just jammed,” said manager Sallie Power, the only waitress in the restaurant when the rush started. “We were a little pocket, a block that had electricity. Everyone else around us was out.”

Featuring a children’s menu that includes Mickey Mouse pancakes, Miz Brown’s did two-thirds more business than usual for a weekday between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m., Power said.

Most patrons were patient, she said, but a few did get surly.

“People just couldn’t deal with the fact that they were going to be late for work,” she said.

At Fisherman’s Wharf, in Chinatown and North Beach--among the city’s most popular tourist areas--guests accustomed to pampering found themselves roughing it.

The Tuscan Inn, a 221-room tourist hotel at Fisherman’s Wharf, was fully booked when the lights went out, said Tara Tula, the hotel’s office manager.

The four-hour power outage at the hotel began at 6:30 a.m., setting off the fire alarm. The timing couldn’t have been worse, Tula said, because early morning is a prime check-out time for tourists.

Hotel workers handed out flashlights to every room, wrote down credit card numbers and promised to send bills later. The kitchen could not serve meals, but did come up with complimentary coffee and rolls for the guests.

For the most part, Tula said, the guests adapted themselves to being without power. “Only one,” she said “wanted a discount.”

Researcher Norma Kaufman and the Associated Press contributed to this story.