Power Outage Knocks Out Electricity for Thousands Across San Francisco Neighborhoods

An electrical equipment failure in an underground vault at 18th and Guerrero streets in the Mission District triggered a cascade of power outages across San Francisco on March 20, knocking out electricity for nearly 14,000 customers at the disruption's peak as the city baked through its hottest March day on record.

The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management sounded the alarm around 3:15 p.m., posting on social media that "a large, unplanned power outage is impacting multiple neighborhoods and moving throughout the city." The first outage had started at 2:28 p.m., according to PG&E. By around 3:00 p.m., roughly half of the affected customers had been restored, leaving 7,161 still without power, PG&E reported. A mid-afternoon snapshot of PG&E's outage map showed more than 6,300 customers affected at that moment.

The outages spread across the city's west side, hitting the Sunset District, Lower Haight, Castro, and Cole Valley, while concentrations in the Mission ran along South Van Ness Avenue from 19th Street past 21st Street. A larger cluster of outages fell west of Potrero Avenue, spanning several blocks from 21st Street to 26th Street, and portions of the South of Market neighborhood also lost power.

PG&E issued a statement roughly two hours after the initial disruption, attributing the trouble to the underground vault at 18th and Guerrero. "Crews are on site working to safely restore power as quickly as possible," the utility said. By 6:30 p.m., PG&E reported that power had been restored to nearly all affected customers. At that point, the utility said it had brought back service to approximately 11,000 customers, with roughly 3,100 still without electricity.

A city employee monitoring the outage said PG&E's public communications may have obscured the true scope of the disruptions. According to that employee, what appeared to be a single outage affecting roughly 14,000 customers was in fact a sequence of separate outages impacting different, partially overlapping groups of customers.

The timing made the outage particularly punishing. Downtown temperatures hit 90 degrees Friday, surpassing the previous March record of 87 degrees set in 2005, according to the National Weather Service. The Chronicle reported that some traffic signals were knocked offline during the afternoon. Several businesses said they were impacted.

Restoration efforts continued deep into the evening. PG&E's outage map listed an estimated restoration time of 1:45 a.m. for the unplanned outage. As of 8:41 p.m., 18 outages remained active, with a utility spokesperson saying teams were still investigating the cause. Just after 9 p.m., the count had dropped to 53 customers still without power.

The outage set off political and legal aftershocks. City supervisors moved to question Waymo about problems that occurred during the widespread blackout, and a group of San Francisco small businesses announced a lawsuit against PG&E over losses tied to the outages.