City presses PG&E for answers on S.F. blackout
A letter from three top San Francisco officials to Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s CEO three days after a fire at a downtown substation left 88,000 residents and 21 schools without power for seven hours requested information but no compensation.
Though City Administrator Naomi Kelly, Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White and emergency management Executive Director Anne Kronenberg requested a tour of the damaged Larkin Street facility and a review of all substations throughout the city, they did not ask the utility to pay for lost business on Friday.
“The impact on businesses and our transportation system led to turmoil and lost productivity throughout the city,” the three officials wrote, chiding PG&E for the aging infrastructure at the Larkin Street substation, where a $100 million overhaul was already under way.
PG&E has coughed up money for blackouts before, paying $6.5 million for a 2003 outage that darkened downtown during the busy holiday shopping day. That incident also began with a fire, at a major substation on Mission and Eighth streets.
Documents from the state’s Public Utilities Commission show that five other fires occurred at indoor substations in San Francisco between November 1996 and March 2005, including another blaze at the Mission substation, in 1996.
The economic hit that San Francisco took on Friday is being assessed by the city controller’s office, said Mayor Ed Lee’s spokeswoman Deirdre Hussey.
City Controller Ben Rosenfield said his office has sent notices to all city departments and to the school district, asking them to calculate losses in revenue or costs from redeploying staff to deal with the outage. He expects preliminary results within a week and said the whole analysis will likely take about two weeks.
At this point the analysis does not account for businesses that were shut down Friday. Department of Emergency Management spokesman Francis Zamora told The Chronicle that officials plan to reach out to the Chamber of Commerce and Business Owners Management Association, and that the city may seek reimbursement on their members’ behalf.
Supervisors London Breed and Aaron Peskin Tuesday called for a hearing, which will be held May 3, into the lack of communication during the power outage, saying they received no communication from PG&E and didn’t hear from the city’s Department of Emergency Services for more than four hours.
“The communication from PG&E (that day) was nonexistent,” Peskin said. — Rachel Swan Speed cameras slowed: San Francisco drivers intent on going too fast can rest easy — there won’t be any speed cameras tracking their movements anytime soon.
We told you that a new group called San Francisco Bay Area Families for Safe Streets formed late last year to try to do something about the scourge of pedestrian injuries and deaths on city streets.
Their first action was encouraging Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, to introduce legislation in Sacramento allowing San Francisco and San Jose to try speed cameras in a pilot program. He introduced the legislation, but it died in the Transportation Committee on Monday. Law enforcement agencies opposed the bill, which seems to have been its death knell. Chiu is likely to try again next year.
San Francisco General Hospital treats a new victim with a serious traffic-related injury every 17 hours on average.
On his Facebook page, Chiu thanked the families who testified in committee, including Liz Sanchez-Chavez, whose 5-year-old daughter, Aileen, was killed in a San Jose crosswalk by a speeding driver.
“We know that speed kills, and we believe that (security cameras) will save lives,” Chiu wrote. “For the sake of Aileen and so many others, we won’t give up.”
— Heather Knight Email: cityinsider@ sfchronicle.com, rswan@ sfchronicle.com, hknight@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfcityinsider, @rachelswan, @hknightsf