Massive Power Outage in San Francisco Leaves 90,000 customers Without Power

Officials say that a circuit breaker failure at the Larkin Substation, caused the fire that left nearly 90,000 customers in San Francisco without electricity.

Pacific Gas and Electric reports that power has been restored to all but 3,000 San Francisco homes. PG&E hopes to restore power to the rest by 5 pm PST.

City officials also say they will have traffic control officers at the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge. Otherwise, the Friday drive to Marin County might become a gridlock of Biblical proportions.

Smoke poured from the substation at Larkin and Turk Streets where the outage originated. "We needed to extinguish the insulation that was burning around the breaker. We were able to successfully do that with a chemical agent. We did notice some flare-ups, so we did apply CO2 to the fire," San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White said.

The outage knocked out power to the Montgomery Street BART Station, forcing a temporary closure. Many businesses chose to close for the day due to the outage. "We lost a lot of business today. It was a big day for us, Friday. We lost breakfast, lunch. And the problem is we have all of the employees here. We can't let them go, because the power is coming back, we'd be in big trouble too," one restaurant owner said.

Photos shared on Twitter show an eerie look inside the Montgomery station, which was empty and with the lights out.

A massive power outage left 90,000 people without power and shut down a BART station in San Francisco Friday morning. Power has since been restored to Montgomery Station thanks to a backup generator.

The series of outages began at around 9 a.m., according to PG&E. By 12:30 p.m., power was restored to about 10,000 of those customers.

Service for San Francisco's famous cable car lines was also halted, with no estimation was given for a time of resumption. The 150 year old system used to be powered by horses, who are not subject to power outages.

#SF Outage: Crews working safely & quickly as possible to restore pwr - current est. 1 PM for most customers. Thank you for your patience.

- PG&E (@PGE4Me) 11:16 AM - 21 Apr 2017

PG&E says a series of outages began at 9:00 a.m. after a fire broke out at a PG&E substation on Larkin St. in San Francisco.

Officials released a list of the impacted areas:

Western Addition

Pacific Heights

Japantown

Polk Gulch

Russian Hill

Marina

Richmond

Presidio

Laurel Heights

Sunset

Financial District

Chinatown

North Beach

Fisherman's Wharf

Laurel Village Shopping Center

The people of San Francisco are taking to Twitter to vent about the power outage

A number of San Francisco schools have been affected as well. The schools will remain open as long as the students are safe, officials reported.