PG&E’S CEO FACED A SLEW of questions from several San Francisco supervisors on Thursday during a hearing that provided some answers regarding concerns with the utility’s decisions and responses to a blackout in December that left one-third of the city without power.
The hearing, which occurred during a Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee meeting, was called by Supervisor Alan Wong.
Revelations came to the surface such as a lapse in communications and coordination with the city and its emergency response teams, PG&E using software that created inaccurate measurements of estimated restoration times, and miscommunication within the organization.
“What we saw was a clear breakdown in communication,” said Supervisor Bilal Mahmood in an interview after the hearing. “It’s very clear that they don’t have the adequate procedures and protocols in place to address this issue … We also learned that there was lack of consistent, proactive collaboration with the city.”
In the afternoon of Dec. 20, one of the busiest shopping days of the year, over 130,000 PG&E customers in San Francisco lost power. By 10 p.m., power was restored for the majority of those that lost power.
However, some residents and businesses in the Richmond and Sunset districts were without power for up to 72 hours.
Delayed alerts, internal missteps drew sharp criticism
At Thursday’s hearing, PG&E CEO Sumeet Singh discussed the causes, timelines, and responses surrounding the blackout.
Just after 1 p.m., a circuit breaker at the utility’s Mission substation failed and a fire broke out. The power was deliberately turned off at the station for the safety of fire crews and PG&E staff responding to the fire.
The San Francisco Fire Department did not receive a call about the fire until more than an hour after the fire started, according to SFFD Deputy Chief of Operations Patrick Rabbitt.
What concerned Wong and Mahmood the most was a delay in communication with the city’s Department of Emergency Management.
PG&E did not notify DEM of the fire until two hours after it started, said DEM Executive Director Mary Ellen Carroll.
“They did not receive any communication from PG&E for two hours,” Mahmood said. “DEM is leading the citywide emergency response, and for a company and entity that is the cause of this that did not reach out to the central agency in the city that is actually guiding this response, that is unacceptable.”
Carroll also described what she saw as a lack of communication from the higher-ups in PG&E to their liaison responsible for collaborating with DEM.
“Within PG&E, it was clear that there were issues with communication within the organization,” Carroll said at the hearing.
PG&E also sent out inaccurate time estimates for when power would be restored. Singh said that the company relies on algorithms to determine estimated times of restoration, but that the amount of data the algorithm uses is limited.
Singh said PG&E will commit to updating its software to include more expansive data.
Additionally, Mahmood raised concerns over possible negligence from PG&E based on the history of the specific substation and how the utility has previously been held liable for not properly maintaining its equipment.
Third time, same questions
In 2003, on the same date of Dec. 20, a similar fire broke out at the same substation. The city reached a settlement with PG&E related to the fire, and the California Public Utilities Commission ordered the utility to implement upgrades to the substation’s infrastructure. The CPUC also found that PG&E had not followed its own recommendations on structural improvements following a fire at the same substation in 1996.
“My concern is that this is the third time now that something has failed at the substation, despite hundreds of millions of dollars, according to them, in investments,” Mahmood said. “We want to really understand what caused the circuit breaker to fail this time, despite the supposed investments they’ve made in this substation.”
Singh acknowledged responsibility for the shortfalls of PG&E in its response to the fire and outage, saying that the “complexity” of the outage led to the several missteps.
“The complexity of the incident created the challenge to understand the extent of the damage and how long the escalation was going to take place,” Singh said. “It had to do with the complexity of the damage, the complexity of the interconnected nature of the system, and that’s really why there’s an extended outage duration for some of our customers.”
Wong, who called for the hearing, felt that he and the public got some answers from the utility during the hearing, but he is hoping to get more out of PG&E at a future hearing, which will not occur for at least one more month.
The next hearing will occur after PG&E receives the results of a third-party investigation into the causes of the circuit failure.
“I think there are a lot of unanswered questions,” Wong said in an interview. “I think that this is really important in getting out the facts and information out to the public so they understand what happened. PG&E is giving as much answers as we can get from them, and it’s important that the public knows.”