PG&E restores power for West Valley residents
Several power outages days before Christmas left thousands of West Valley residents without power for a few hours Wednesday.
About 16,500 customers were affected by a power outage caused by a fire at a Pacific Gas & Electric substation in Saratoga on Wednesday morning.
A utility company spokeswoman said they received reports of a fire at the substation around 8:25 a.m. Wednesday. Santa Clara County Fire personnel responded to make sure surrounding community and PG&E employees were safe.
The fire was isolated to a certain area of the substation and ended up extinguishing by itself, so no fire suppression efforts occurred. The PG&E spokeswoman said that they were able to restore power for a majority of customers within the first hour of the outage. Power has since between restored for all customers.
The spokeswoman said equipment failure caused the fire, but the cause for the equipment failure is under investigation.
PG&E used the time between the storm Tuesday night and Wednesday night to send crews to areas that would be impacted by the weather with enough equipment to restore power and respond to any outages quickly and safely.
“Even though it’s the holidays, we know that it’s very important for families to have power to be able to celebrate, and that’s why we make sure that we have staff working,” she said.
However, storm-related power outages still affected fewer than 3,000 customers in Los Gatos, Sunnyvale and Saratoga on Wednesday. The causes of these power outages included downed trees taking out wires or broken poles. The extent of the damage creates a disparity in how long it takes to restore power.
Tod Rathbone, 63, who is visiting the Bay Area from New York City, said he woke up Wednesday morning to the power outage at his mother-in-law’s house. He said their power was restored between 12:30 p.m. or 1 p.m.
In San Francisco, a blackout on Saturday affected 125,000 customers, according to Mission Local. Power was restored on Tuesday.