Widespread Blackout Cripples the Bay Area

A massive power outage accidentally caused by electric company workers crippled this busy city and its southern suburbs Tuesday during the morning rush hour, trapping subway commuters under the bay, holding high-rise residents hostage in stalled elevators and slowing business to a crawl.

“It appears at this time that simple human error may have been to blame,” said a crestfallen Gordon Smith, president of Pacific Gas & Electric. Smith said it was a PG&E; crew’s mistake during renovations at a San Mateo substation, south of the city, that triggered the 8:17 a.m. blackout.

The result was daylong chaos, affecting nearly a million people in San Francisco and neighboring cities before power was restored by early evening. Authorities reported one related death, a 73-year-old woman who was struck by a big rig in a downtown intersection without an operating traffic signal.

Although small patches of the city kept their electricity, the financial district was in disarray for hours. Stalled electric buses and trolleys lined Market Street, the heart of downtown, as public transportation ground to a halt. Phones went dead and computer screens blacked out at the Pacific Exchange, sending some traders to nearby bars for Bloody Marys or to play football in the empty avenues.

Office workers cobbled together makeshift work spaces in borrowed conference rooms. Public hospitals canceled elective surgeries, as they were forced onto backup generators to keep functioning.

There were no reports of looting or unusual criminal activity.

“People behaved themselves,” said police spokesman Dewayne Tully.

Police officers fanned out across the city to direct traffic when all 1,000 signals were knocked out of service for several hours. Commuters had to be led out of darkened subway tunnels by city workers. Even the famed cable cars were idled.

An angry Mayor Willie Brown, overseeing operations from the Office of Emergency Services, fumed about the lack of backup for the city’s power grid.

“I assume you would have some system that would be backup when you have human error,” Brown said. “Obviously they do not have it in place. They do need it. . . . We’re on a peninsula. There always ought to be alternative methods for energy to be delivered.”

But he also praised his city for its resiliency, saying that “road rage was reduced to a minimum” though there were no traffic signals.

“The city, I believe, is functioning as best it can with only limited power,” he said. “The city of San Francisco ought to be complimented. They were incredibly tolerant and polite.”

Brown declared a state of emergency late in the afternoon. Illegally parked cars were not towed. Commuters were allowed to ride the Municipal bus system for free until midnight.

Early in the day, 200 city workers were dispatched to help the elderly walk down darkened stairwells at eight of the city’s 22 publicly owned high-rise retirement homes.

Coping With Conditions

Public schools operated as usual--with only natural light--and parents had to pick up the younger children in the afternoon. At Commodore Sloat Elementary School, parent volunteers brought in hot spaghetti, bagels and lunch meat--enough to feed the 170 students who usually dine in the cafeteria.

“The kids were cold, but we had enough natural light in the classrooms, and lessons went on in their normal way,” said Principal Kathy Wong. “We had to take the children to the bathroom using flashlights, and that caused some laughter.”

Evacuated from their high-rise office buildings, thousands of workers whipped out cell phones on city sidewalks, checking on family members and struggling to reach bosses or clients. But others simply gave up and tried to find a way home.

Matt Solem’s Bay Area Rapid Transit train stopped far beneath the cold bay waters when the power went out. Solem and hundreds of passengers were trapped for 90 minutes en route from their East Bay homes to their San Francisco offices. Some read. Others worked on personal computers. Solem slept.

“If my train was on time, we would have gotten here at 8:25 a.m.,” he said, as he emerged from the Embarcadero BART station looking a little dazed just after 10 a.m. “They announced that the power went out. I wondered if there was an earthquake. Everyone was calm on the train. We’re used to it. They break down a lot.”

BART closed its San Francisco stations for most of the day, and no trains ran into or out of the city until 2 p.m., when city service resumed.

Angelica Enriquez had taken the day off from high school and with her mother, Marylou Enriquez, came on BART from the East Bay for Angelica’s long-awaited citizenship interview with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. As she sat down for her chat with an INS agent, Angelica said, the lights went out.

“They told us to leave the building, that they were closing for the day,” she said. “It was so disappointing. I’ve waited so long.”

At San Francisco International Airport, the country’s fifth-busiest, a breakdown in ground control services caused 18 aircraft to divert to Seattle, Phoenix, San Jose and Salt Lake City, said spokesman Ron Wilson. As many as 30 to 40 outgoing flights were delayed.

The control tower, runway lights and navigation and security equipment functioned on backup power, but the baggage handling equipment and airline ticket counters were offline from about 8:20 a.m. to 9:20 a.m.

PG&E; said the region’s power trouble began when a crew of workers was bringing the San Mateo substation back online after completing a project to increase its capacity. The crew apparently did not follow standard procedures and mistakenly left a grounding pipe in place while turning circuits back on. The resulting power surge was experienced as far north as Napa and as far east as Sacramento.

Three 115,000-volt power lines to San Francisco from stations to the south of the city go through that San Mateo substation, utility head Smith explained at a news conference where he was peppered with hostile questions.

The beleaguered president apologized to the city and PG&E;’s customers and said the company is convening a task force to figure out what went wrong and how to avoid a repeat.

“We are certainly sorry about this,” Smith said, explaining that PG&E; would consider claims for reimbursement from customers who suffered losses.

Smith said the company has not ruled out the possibility of sabotage in the outage that cut service to 375,000 business and residential customers, but added that “we have no evidence of that.”

Smith insisted that as bad as the outage was, it could have been worse. All of Northern California could have been without power, he said, had the system not shut itself down when the power surge occurred.

But that was small comfort to San Franciscans, whose lights flickered, then went out just as most of them were rushing to work or school. It was the most widespread loss of power since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake devastated the Bay Area. There was another early morning blackout Oct 23, 1997, which investigators said was caused by disgruntled PG&E; employees, but that failure knocked out power to just 250,000 people for only three hours. Although most of San Francisco’s 49 square miles were affected Tuesday, the power outage actually hit the city in a patchwork fashion, causing famine for some businesses and feast for others. Many buildings in the busy downtown were able to switch on emergency generators, creating isolated pockets of glowing light. Others never lost power.

On the north side of Market Street, a coffee shop was forced to close its doors by 9 a.m. Most of its staff then walked across to the south side, where another outlet of the chain had power and was doing a booming business.

Many Make the Best of It

At Sanwa Bank, the lobby Christmas tree was brightly lit and green exit signs shone over doorways. All was normal--except there were few customers and fewer employees.

Most automated bank machines went out with the lights. Across the city, banks put hand-lettered signs in their windows telling customers they were closed “until further notice due to the power outage.”

Although Spectrum Federal Credit Union was open for business, computer-less employees were reduced to accepting only checks for deposit, writing out receipts by hand and postponing money transfers until a later date.

“We got phones. We got lights,” said Andre Bresee, member service officer for the credit union. “Hey, Rob. Is McDonald’s up? We got civilization.”

Robert Fischbach and Marty Brainerd walked 10 blocks from their darkened offices at Bank of America to eat burritos at a Mexican restaurant near the Embarcadero. The diner had no lights but could still cook burritos and beans on its gas stove. It was packed.

“People on the 28th floor of our building got sent home because it just got too hot up there with no air conditioning,” Brainerd said. “But women in our offices on the mezzanine were cold because there was no heating.” In their offices, the pair said, phones worked but computers didn’t, so they were spending the day writing Christmas cards to corporate clients.

“There are all these little things that you just take for granted. Maybe this is a preview of the year 2000,” Fischbach said, referring to the computer chaos that is anticipated by some when the calendar turns to zeros.

“Blackout” screamed the one-word headline in the San Francisco Examiner’s afternoon’s editions. The paper ought to know. The finished pages were sent through a generator-powered Macintosh computer to a printing plant in the East Bay city of Richmond and then ferried across to San Francisco for on-time delivery.

“It was a combination of 21st century technology with 19th century kind of chewing gum, glue and spit,” said Executive Editor Phil Bronstein.

NBC’s KRON-TV was off the air for about 1 1/2 hours after a backup generator failed. ABC’s KGO-TV and CBS’ KPIX-TV never lost power.

In the critical countdown to Christmas, the outage shuttered Union Square, the city’s famed shopping district. Macy’s flagship store and Saks Fifth Avenue did no business. The five-story Christmas tree in Nieman Marcus’ semi-circular window was dark. All that glowed at Victoria’s Secret was the sparkling lingerie.

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Times staff writer John Glionna in Los Angeles and researcher Norma Kaufman in San Francisco contributed to this report.

* INGENUITY RULES

Cell phones, votive candles and a locomotive help the city’s denizens make do. A30