S.F. asking PG&E to pay up for blackout

San Francisco city departments suffered $187,000 in revenue and operating losses during the April 21 power failure, and they’re going to ask PG&E to pay up.

“The city will seek reimbursement for the loss of revenue as a result of the power outage,” City Administrator Naomi Kelly said Friday, after receiving the estimates from city Controller Ben Rosenfield.

Mayor Ed Lee, who directed Kelly to file the claim, said he and other officials “expect PG&E to do everything in their power to make sure these types of incidents do not happen again.”

The city’s Municipal Transportation Agency took the biggest hit from the eight-hour blackout, giving up nearly $180,000 in lost fares and citation revenue, along with the cost of supplying extra bus service when six lines that normally run on electricity went down.

SFMTA spokesman Paul Rose said his department accounts for “unplanned incidents such as these” in its operating budget.

“During the power outage our efforts were focused on making adjustments to transit service and deploying officers to assist with traffic ... and less on expenditures and revenues,” he said in a statement released Friday.

Five other departments also lost money that day. The Department of Emergency Management paid $2,361 for extra labor, food and generator fuel. The Police Department spent $1,665 on extended patrol shifts. Public Health bore $1,561 in overtime costs, the War Memorial and Performing Arts Center paid $1,045 to reprogram its control boards and fuel its generator, and the Sheriff ’s Department paid $853 in overtime to its emergency response team.

The controller’s analysis did not include all the revenue San Francisco businesses forfeited when they had to close up shop during the blackout. Department of Emergency Management spokesman Francis Zamora said in a recent interview that the city might add up those losses separately.

PG&E has provided reimbursement for blackouts before, paying $6.5 million for a 2003 blackout that choked off business downtown during a busy holiday shopping day. That power failure stemmed from a fire at a major substation — the same thing that caused the massive power failure April 21, when a fire in a Tenderloin substation knocked out power for seven hours to much of downtown and northern areas of the city.

PG&E spokeswoman Andrea Menniti could not immediately comment because the company had yet to see the controller’s analysis and the city’s claim. Kelly and two other city officials — Fire Chief Joanne HayesWhite and Department of Emergency Management Director Anne Kronenberg — recently sent a letter to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. asking the company to inspect all of its San Francisco substations and provide detailed information on equipment failures, recovery measures and future repairs.