Life Goes On, Colder and Dimmer, as Lights Go Out

They were drinking in the dark at the Brown Jug Saloon, hoping the ice would outlast the blackout and timing the outage by the rising temperature of the Budweiser on tap.

“The TV got fuzzy and then we all said to each other, ‘Uh oh, I guess this is a brownout,’ ” said patron Charles Gutierrez, 53.

On Wednesday in the Tenderloin, one of San Francisco’s more slow-to-gentrify neighborhoods, the locals bought cigarettes and sodas at the Cadillac Market by the light of a single votive candle. Store manager Ray Kayed kept records the inconvenient way, felt-tip pen on brown paper bag.

Pedestrians picked wary paths across crowded streets, waved on by a ballet of orange-gloved traffic officers. Apartment managers wielded flashlights. Residents and workers shivered in the chilly rooms of aging Victorians.

The rolling blackouts that plagued California were fast and fickle, rolling out for just 90 minutes to two hours at a time Wednesday and purposely targeting small pockets from Bakersfield to the Oregon border, instead of vast swatches of real estate. No cities shut down. Nobody died.

“For one hour on one day out of the year, it’s kind of a pimple on a flea,” said Laurie Alire, vice president of Palo Alto-based Varian, a maker of scientific instruments and electronics, where employees used the darkest hour to hold meetings and make phone calls.

While the outages were initially confined to Northern California, power customers in the southern part of the state girded Wednesday in case the blackouts spread their way.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which runs the largest jail system in the country, received an exemption from any rolling blackouts from Southern California Edison. Capt. Ray Leyva, department spokesman, said the department sought the exemption for public safety reasons.

And the Ronald Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles was closed early Wednesday to conserve electricity. Parents using the building’s day-care facility were telephoned and told to pick their children up early.

But the impact on basic daily life was stark in neighborhoods where the lights actually went out, such as San Francisco’s Tenderloin, North Beach, Chinatown and Haight Ashbury districts. Areas of Oakland, Richmond, Cupertino, Redwood City, San Jose and Palo Alto were without power for as much as three hours, along with Santa Cruz, Watsonville and Fresno.

In San Francisco, the building that houses the state Supreme Court and 20 state agencies--including the Franchise Tax Board and the Fair Employment and Housing Department--went without power for two hours.

Wells Fargo reported that 100 of its 2,800 automated tellers were knocked out by the power outage. And forget about cooking for a sick child on an electric stove. “I have a 12-year-old child who would like some soup that I can’t fix,” said Jacalyn Golston, of Fresno.

Main Street went dark in Watsonville, 74 miles south of San Francisco. The Police Department had a generator; most businesses did not. City Manager Carlos Palacios spent much of the afternoon fielding calls from angry entrepreneurs who he said were “upset about being blacked out without any notice. It’s really hurting their bottom line.”

But what got Palacios most upset--more than the calls, more than the traffic congestion caused by useless street lights--was that PG&E; promised that police and fire services would not be affected, but both lost power.

“They said it would not impact police and fire, and it did,” he said, noting that he would meet with utility officials to demand an explanation.

PG&E; spokesman John Tremayne said the agency could not confirm the outages but would be happy to meet with city officials. “We take this extremely seriously as well,” he said.

In Cupertino, scattered intersections were without power, said James Davis, the city’s public works supervisor. “I took a ride around town in the lunch hour and it was a really strange sight--lights working here and not there,” he said.

For Robin Carr, a public relations executive at a Silicon Valley video game company, negotiating traffic in downtown Palo Alto on Wednesday was like being a character in one of her own games. “It was bad, totally clogged up. I found myself trying to escape Palo Alto,” she said.

Two small newspapers along the Central Coast did double duty Wednesday, as both victims of the power outages and media outlets covering the story. Power went out at the Santa Cruz Sentinel a little after noon, said Liz Kellar, assistant city editor: “There was a lot of moaning and groaning in the newsroom.”

The Sentinel had a backup generator. But reporters and editors at the Monterey County Herald--which has no generator and was warned that it would lose power about 4 p.m.--worked “under emergency status,” said City Editor Royal Calkins.

PG&E; spokeswoman Staci Homrig said the blackouts came in two overlapping waves, each hitting about 200,000 customers. The first began about 11:50 a.m. and the second about 1:15 p.m. “We couldn’t turn on the lights for the first group until we turned them off for the second batch of customers.”

In San Francisco, 40 intersections throughout the city were without traffic lights during the outages, and about 60 traffic officers directed motorists and pedestrians alike.

At the Tenderloin intersection of Turk and Hyde streets, the cars were far more obedient. “Watch it, guys,” shouted one orange-vested officer, as a group of presumptuous pedestrians ignored her directions. “No lights! Watch me!”

Or at least watch out for the Miller truck delivering beer at the Hyde & Turk Market, where store owner Francis Chuung shivered in the dark. Business was down. The electronic cash register was silent.

“The ice cream will turn in to ice cream soda pretty soon,” Chuung complained. “Good thing we got a calculator. . . . [But there are] no lottery tickets, and a lot of disappointed gamblers.”

Not to mention lawyers. Raquel Fox and Dean Preston stopped in at the Hyde & Turk looking for respite from their heatless offices at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, where they advocate for the poor in this residentially challenged city.

“I’ve got a brief due in the Court of Appeal, and we can’t use our computers,” said Fox, who threatened to find a warm law library elsewhere--or go home and play with her puppy instead.

A few blocks east, three students were trapped briefly in the elevators at Hastings College of the Law, a branch of the University of California.

At the New Style Beauty Salon, the phones were off--and so were the blow dryers. “This lady, I just finish her perm, and I can’t blow dry it,” said stylist Tina Tu. “And people with very short hair, we can’t use the clipper.”

On the other hand, just how advisable is it to get a haircut in a dark beauty parlor? Cabdriver Geff Clinton, who allowed Tu to wield sharp scissors near his ears during the outage, didn’t seem to mind. To him, the biggest threat Wednesday wasn’t from slipped scissors.

“Many of the stoplights in town are out, and it’s much more dangerous,” Clinton said. “I blame PG&E.;”

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Times staff writers John Johnson, Rebecca Trounson, Eric Malnic, Maura Dolan and Joe Menn contributed to this story.

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