The heat wave in the Bay Area is continuing to knock out power in several neighborhoods and many residents are annoyed by the outages.
PG&E says they are trying to keep up with the outages that are being triggered by a variety of things ranging from customers overloading the system to PG&E "employee error". The error is what caused the blackout in Marin County Thursday.
Residents from San Jose say they are upset after PG&E crew members did not showing up until the next day to fix the issue.
"When they don’t even check if the power is back to the house that reported the outage," said Marin residents that did not want to be identified. "That is just incompetence or negligence."
The outage occurred around 11 p.m. and left about 61,000 customers without power.
PG&E employees say they understand the frustration but say they have crew members spread out all over the Bay Area.
The electrical company says the disruption was not caused by high demand or weather but the protective system designed to prevent outages did not get set up properly at a Novato substation.
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Officials say once workers installed the system, power was restored by 1:30 Friday morning.
Another issue residents complained about is the misleading text messaged from PG&E.
One customer says he lost thousands of dollars of medicine because he left his medication in the refrigerator after receiving an alert saying power had been restored.
"I thought the power was going to be back and my medicine is going to be OK," said San Jose resident, who wished not to be identified. "Now it’s all gone."
PG&E officials say they are looking into the problem saying it’s an automated system and most outages have been resolved. But acknowledges that doesn’t offer much comfort to residents who remain without power.
