S.F. Blackout Was Deliberate, FBI Says

The FBI on Friday said the early morning power outage that left a third of the city dark Thursday morning was deliberately caused and investigators were reviewing personnel records of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. employees.

“It appears to be a deliberate act,” said Robert Griego, an FBI spokesman. A special anti-terrorism investigative team was interviewing current and former PG & E employees and trying to determine who had access to the locked, unstaffed facility, Griego said.

“No one has claimed responsibility for this act,” he said. It is a federal offense to tamper with an energy facility or to attempt to interrupt the flow of energy through such a facility, Griego noted.

Three banks of transformers in a substation near the Civic Center went dead about 6:15 a.m. Thursday, leaving 127,000 customers without power and disrupting rush-hour traffic and businesses. Power was not fully restored for nearly four hours.

The apparent sabotage is “a wake-up call. . . . Perhaps all the utilities in the state, under our jurisdiction, need to take another look at security measures,” said Julian Ajello, a supervisor with the California Public Utilities Commission’s security division.

“We’re all quite concerned about this,” said Todd Novak, a PUC engineer who inspected the substation shortly after the blackout began. Novak said 39 of 42 black plastic knobs on a 40-foot-long bank of transformers in the substation had been turned to the “open” position, draining energy from the transformers.

Such an act, he said, could be done in less than a minute, but would have been deliberate and would have required some technical knowledge of how the substation works.

“Why were three left unturned? I don’t know,” Novak said.

Ajello, a 26-year veteran of the commission, said he could recall no other instance of tampering with the control panels of an urban substation.

“This is a huge, green, marble building with no windows, no distinguishing features and very few doors. The doors are heavy, must be opened with a key and slam shut behind you. It is not that easy to get in,” Ajello said.

A PG & E spokesman said the company is not involved in labor negotiations and has not experienced any recent labor unrest.

But Nicolette Touissant, a spokeswoman for the statewide utility watchdog group The Utility Reform Network, noted that PG & E laid off 28% of its work force in 1993 and 1994, and is faced with the prospect of laying off additional workers next year when the state is due to open the utility market to competition.

Utilities from other states are expected to offer stiff competition to PG & E and other California utilities for customers who spend $20 billion a year on electricity.

“Over the last couple of years, this whole squeezing of this regulated monopoly into a competitive framework hasn’t happened without a lot of discomfort for employees,” Touissant said. “That might be a reason why somebody would be mad enough to throw the switches at a substation.”