Ingenuity Is Order of the Day as City Tries to Cope

I showered by candlelight, which might have been romantic under different circumstances.

On this day, my husband was 3,000 miles away on business, and a blackout had reduced the city to chaos 21 floors below my high-rise, all-electric, downtown apartment.

The good news was that the hot water lasted. The bad news was no hot tea (blame the electric stove), no news (blame electric-powered television and portable radios that get terrible reception in steel-framed buildings).

The worst news came an hour after the power went out, when the public address system blasted evacuation orders as I sat with wet hair in a terry cloth robe, squinting at the newspaper in the dim natural light.

If you do not leave now, you may be stuck in the building, intoned the disembodied voice. The generators may not last.

On goes the turtleneck, heavy sweater and jeans. Then the priorities get fuzzy: Do you tuck in the shirt and button the pants? A pause. Yes. Do you brush your teeth or put on shoes? The teeth win. Do you have any cash, because the ATMs are down. Eleven dollars, and it lasted through caffeine and a cab ride, with a buck left for the bus.

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Ingenuity was the order of the day. Masters of the universe, reduced to hanging out in lobbies, had to scramble to figure out busy work for no-tech staff members, thanks to a bungling Pacific Gas & Electric crew that plunged the city into darkness.

Cell phones reigned supreme. “At least we can still call Tokyo,” sighed one international investment banker.

At the city’s venerable St. Francis Hotel on Union Square, the lights went out several hours before the staff was to serve lunch to 650 3Com conventioneers. What to do?

“We used thousands of votive candles, and we served lunch as planned in the Colonial ballroom,” said spokeswoman Marsha Monro. “It turned into a special holiday treat, San Francisco style.”

The hotel also accommodated a field trip of kindergartners from the city’s El Dorado public elementary school. The wide-eyed set was heading for the FAO Schwarz toy store when the power went out. They ended up at the swank St. Francis with its ample supply of flashlights and collection of more than 3,000 Santa dolls from around the world.

“In San Francisco, we’re always prepared for the Big One,” Monro said. “But never in our wildest dreams did we imagine a bay-wide blackout.”

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A San Francisco CalTrain station used an ingenious method to keep power going: It hooked up one of its own locomotives to supply power.

For five hours, the locomotive powered not only the passenger escalators and lights, but the air switches used to move trains from track to track at the train line’s busiest station, at 4th and King streets.

“It’s something we planned on doing if the power went out,” said Rita Haskin, a spokeswoman for CalTrain, “and it worked perfectly.”

A huge circuit breaker did the trick, harnessing the locomotive’s power once workers realized that PG&E; wasn’t going to be any help any time soon. Haskin said the 15-year-old locomotive has been used to supply power during other smaller outages, but never for so long.

The CalTrain locomotives supply electricity and air-conditioning to passenger cars and this one was easily connected by hooking up a large wire to the circuit breaker.

Said Haskin: “That’s all it took.”

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For some people, even inventiveness wasn’t enough. At the Embarcadero Hyatt, where the power never went out, a trio of bond salesmen drank Bloody Marys at 10 a.m. in the atrium bar and brooded over the day’s losses. The Pacific Exchange closed shortly after the blackout hit.

“I was in the middle of a $250-million deal, and I don’t think it will go through because they can’t call me,” said Anita Long. “Oh well, it is only money.”

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Times staff writers Mary Curtius and John Glionna contributed to this report.

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San Francisco Blackout

A mistake by electrical workers in San Mateo on Tuesday morning caused a widespread blackout in the San Francisco area:

* Customers affected: 375,000 homes and businesses; about 940,000 people

* Transportation

Traffic lights out; 17 of 57 Bay Area Rapid Transit trains out of commission; cable cars inoperable; and half the fleet of electric-powered buses, trolleys and trains stranded.

* S. F. International Airport

Eighteen flights diverted to San Jose and Oakland.

* Pacific Exchange

Trading halted

* Downtown high-rises About 50 high-rises reported stuck elevators with unknown number of people inside.