Simple human error'' leaves San
Francisco without power
04:41 p.m Dec 08, 1998 Eastern
By Greg Frost
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec.8 (Reuters) - A major
power outage blamed on ''simple human error''
struck the San Francisco area on Tuesday morning,
cutting electricity to about a million people and leaving
the city struggling at the height of the morning rush
hour.
The outage, which affected a total of more than
370,000 households and businesses, halted trading at
the Pacific Stock Exchange, briefly dimmed lights on
the Golden Gate Bridge and caused some of the
worst chaos seen in the area since the devastating
1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
''I've lived in the Bay Area for three decades and I've
never seen anything like this,'' said Chris Johnson, a
spokesman for the Pacific Gas and Electric Company,
a unit of PG&E Corp.(PCG.N).
Gordon Smith, the utility's president and chief
executive officer, told a news conference the blackout
had been traced to ''simple human error'' at a
substation in San Mateo County, south of San
Francisco.
Workers adjusting several 115-kilovolt lines turned
power on without proper grounding, Smith said. That
sparked a domino effect, which shut down two San
Francisco substations and pulled the plug on most of
the city and its southern suburbs.
But Smith said that, despite the inconvenience, the
system worked as planned and contained the
blackout.
''I would say that, given the money we've invested
and the work we've done over the last three years in
particular, the system is quite robust,'' Smith said.
PG&E officials said the work crews were manually
checking a series of power substations around the
San Francisco area, and hoped to have power
restored by mid-afternoon. ''It's not like just flicking a
switch,'' Johnson said.
The outage brought mass transit systems throughout
the San Francisco Bay area to a halt, and officials at
San Francisco International Airport said the airport
had been forced to turn to emergency auxiliary power
for much of the morning.
Traffic lights around San Francisco blinked out at the
height of rush hour, leaving traffic snarled and halting
the city's electrical bus system.
In high-rise office towers in the city's business district,
dozens of people trapped in elevators called the fire
department by cellphone asking for help, said Lt. Ed
Campbell said, a department spokesman.
''We've answered scores,'' Campbell said. ''We've
had a significant increase in stuck elevator calls.''
Some commentators noted San Francisco was well
prepared to deal with the outage because of its history
with earthquakes, and that key city services such as
hospitals were able to maintain skeleton service by
using emergency generators.
''All the rehearsals and all the preparations and all the
trial runs have now paid dividends,'' Mayor Willie
Brown told reporters. ''San Franciscans have been
performing magnificently...road rage has been totally
removed, people have been incredibly courteous to
each other.''
Police reported no incidents of looting, and only one
person was injured in an accident that could be
attributed to the morning's traffic chaos.
In the downtown Union Square shopping area,
however, major department stores kept their doors
closed because neither lights nor cash registers would
work, while the city's famed cable cars disappointed
tourists by stopping in their tracks.
The Pacific Stock Exchange halted all trading after
phones and computers shut off, and a spokeswoman
said the outage could cost the exchange millions of
dollars in lost business.
''We expected to have power back by now,''
exchange spokesperson Jeanie Williams said, after the
normally boisterous equities and options trading floors
had been dark for more than two hours. ''We're on
tenterhooks.''
The Golden Gate Bridge, which relies on electricity
not only for lights but for metering, quickly switched
to backup power after the outage occurred, but other
major traffic arteries were clogged as commuters
struggled to make it into the city. One of the worst hit
was the Bay Bridge, which was transformed into a
virtual parking lot.
Mike Healy, a spokesman for the Bay Area Rapid
Transit or BART system, said it appeared that service
into and out of the city was completely stopped.
''I think we've got most of the trains at the stations,''
Healy said. ''We've got crews checking everything,
but we're really in a kind of holding pattern right
now.''
As the power blackout stretched into the afternoon,
many commuters began heading back out of the city,
figuring their offices were effectively closed for the
day. Local businesses, too, voiced disappointment
over the loss of holiday shoppers.
''We are probably going to close today because we
don't know what happened. We don't know when the
power is going back on,'' said Pauline Lee, a San
Francisco cafe owner. ''It really affected our
business. It's really terrible.''
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited. |
