Fires at S.F. substations a pattern for PG&E

Coordination between utility, city is criticized

Officials from the San Francisco Fire Department and representatives from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. say they hold regular training sessions to prepare for problems like the one on April 21, when a blaze in a Tenderloin substation knocked out power for seven hours to much of downtown and northern areas of the city.

That’s not good enough for Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who poked holes in those assertions following a hearing at City Hall on Wednesday to address the lack of communication among city and utility officials during and after the fire.

“I want to drill down into what happened,” Peskin said at the hearing, expressing concern about whether the firefighters who responded were familiar with the building. He said later that there were not enough chemical agents on hand at the Larkin Street substation to extinguish the fire, which smoldered for 90 minutes while firefighters worked to contain the flames, ultimately bringing in their own CO2 truck to put it out.

“A fire smoldering for 90 minutes, a first emergency notification to our office five hours after the fire broke — these are troubling numbers that the city should be challenging and monitoring on an ongoing basis,” Peskin said after the

“PG&E has demonstrated time and again that outside oversight is needed.” Dennis Herrera, S.F. city attorney

“Allowing private utilities to police themselves is simply letting the fox guard the hen house,” he said this week.

The state Public Utilities Commission doesn’t require PG&E to report substation fires unless they cause a death, an injury or more than $50,000 in property damage.

“PG&E has demonstrated time and again that outside oversight is needed to protect the public from a company that is driven by profits, not safety,” Herrera said. “While we’re awaiting all the details in this latest fire, their track record speaks for itself.”

That track record includes six blazes between 1996 and 2005, according to filings from the city attorney’s office. Two of those fires were at the substation at Eighth and Mission streets, including one that darkened downtown for nine hours during a busy holiday shopping day in 2003.

That outage prompted a settlement three years later in which PG&E agreed to pay the city $6.5 million, with $500,000 funding a state substation inspection program.

The state PUC established that program in 2012, over objections from Herrera, who said the rules weren’t adequate. The commission requires all utilities in the state to come up with their own safety rules and inspection practices and then to meet annually to compare notes.

PG&E is investigating the April 21 fire at the Larkin Street substation, a process that may take six to eight weeks, said Barry Anderson, PG&E’s vice president of electric distribution. At the time of the fire, the facility was undergoing a $100 million overhaul, which Anderson said will be finished in 2019.

Anderson said at the hearing that PG&E is doing a “root cause” analysis and that it “fully intends to share that information with the city.”

“Unfortunately we don’t have all the answers,” he said.