San Francisco residents and business owners got a chance to vent about a recent blackout that left some in the dark for days.
The city’s board of supervisors president Aaron Peskin called the hearing Thursday, saying PG&E’s response to a major outage last month was unacceptable.
“That meant no access to food and, in many cases, no access to elevators,” he said.
An underground fire on April 26 knocked out power to thousands of customers near Chinatown and downtown, while the majority of customers were restored within 24 hours, some spent more than four days in the dark.
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“I’m 78 years old and I live on the 17th floor,” said Michele Hennessey. “I had to walk down and up, a great difficulty, twice for food and water.”
“We learned that we wouldn’t get power until Monday we were devastated,” said Catherine Bator. “By then, we were living on dried fruit, crackers and peanut butter. Thank God for the gateway management who managed to locate generators for our building.”
A PG&E spokesperson tried to answer questions about the situation and their response.
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“We are conducting an investigation into the incident and we are happy to provide more information when it's available,” said Aaron Jognson of PG&E. “The long term repairs that are needed are still ongoing out there … We have validated that regularly scheduled, annual patrols and triennial inspections were conducted on the affected equipment which was operating within normal parameters. A PG&E troubleshooter was on site within 15 minutes.”
They say they don’t always know right away the root cause or how long an outage may last. The utility says it had more than a dozen crews working to restore power. But several customers at the hearing said the utility's communication wasn’t clear or accurate enough.
“They need to take human beings into account and they need better communications,” said Bator.
“What I'm trying to do here, and the tone that I'm trying to create, is they’ve got to step up their game. They can make things work better. Listen there are going to be transformers that catch on fire but they can do and it is within their control to have much better communication with affected residents.”
