San Francisco, CA
'It takes the hood to save the hood': United Playaz expands its work in San Francisco
On June 12, Filipino Independence Day, the hood in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood got a little stronger.
Rudy Corpuz, the founder of United Playaz – a violence prevention and youth development organization – along with community members and local politicians, were on hand for the opening for UP’s new building at 1044 Howard Street. United Playaz is expanding right next door to its original location. It’s a violence prevention and youth development organization.
“We’re stakeholders because we own land and property,” Corpuz said.
Corpuz grew up and still lives in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood.
“You got families who’ve been here since the 60s who are still here, Filipino families,” he said. “I actually live on the next alley, Minna Street.”
Near his home is the new United Playaz facility on Howard Street.
“This is our new building that’s going to be cut June 12, 2025, the same day that my mom was born, Filipino Independence Day and the day I got arrested as an adult, June 12,” Corpuz said.
Outside the building on Howard Street, a mural of faces. People, Corpuz said, that have been involved in the community, whether they have passed away from gun violence or are helping to shut down and stop gun violence.
The new UP facility will be used to help build children’s literacy and for restorative justice services.
In the alleys of SOMA, the Filipino history dates back more than 100 years when the first generation of immigrants arrived in the United States.
Carla Laurel is the executive director of West Bay Pilipino Multi-Service Center, which is located a couple blocks from United Playaz.
“West Bay Filipino Multi-Service Center has been serving the community since 1968,” Laurel said. “We own in full. This is our hub. Got the blueprint from Rudy here in United Playaz. We’re in the Filipino Cultural Heritage District known as Soma Pilipinas that was named more recently because of the 120-year history of Filipinos in San Francisco.”
West Bay and United Playaz collaborate as one community, offering programs for kindergarten through eighth grade. They serve 150 to 200 children a day.
“How West Bay even started was a lot of the Filipinos that had already been born and raised here seeing recent immigrant Filipinos coming and saying, ‘How do we help too?’” Laurel said.
Corpuz said growing up in SOMA meant having to grow up fast.
“Drugs, gangs, just a lot of fast money moving around and survival,” he said.
That lifestyle sent Corpuz on a destructive path and to prison. His experiences from the past are now shaping how he’s moving his community forward. United Playaz owns both its buildings on Howard Street. Many of the people who work with United Playaz today are former felons and lifers.
At the new building, Corpuz is dedicating it to the women who work alongside him.
“The women, I believe, are like the backbone to the movement,” he said. “Women work harder than men. You guys will go harder than men, I don’t know, for some reason. And they’re the ones who make the change happen.”
San Francisco, CA
Thousands in one San Francisco neighborhood heading into another day without power
While many people in San Francisco have their power back, there are still thousands without it.
At a press conference Monday afternoon, Mayor Daniel Lurie said 4,000 PG&E customers in the Civic Center area are still in the dark. One of them is Parvathy Menon.
“We haven’t been able to take showers or use the bathroom,” said Menon. “Our electricity is out. I think all our food started rotting about a day in.”
She lives at 100 Van Ness. She said she’s grateful she’s going out of town tomorrow, but even that’s posing some problems.
“I actually have to pack for a trip tonight, and we’re doing it in full darkness,” Menon explained. “We are using our phone lights, we are using our laptops to charge our phones.”
Her apartment is pitch black, except for the small amount of streetlight coming through the windows. She said the apartment complex has been doing all they can to help, like providing some food and water.
They have a small generator to power some lights in the lobby and one elevator for the nearly 30-story apartment building.
Menon said she is most upset about the lack of communication from PG&E.
“Initially, when this started, we were supposed to get power back within the day, then it went to the next day and now they just stopped calling us completely,” said Menon.
San Francisco City Hall was closed for the day because of the outage, but Mayor Daniel Lurie held a press conference with Supervisors Matt Dorsey and Bilal Mahmood.
Lurie said what residents have gone through is unacceptable, and he’s lost trust in PG&E’s estimated times for repair.
“They gave us a timeline that they believe in, but it’s not one that I can have confidence in any longer,” Lurie said. “So, we don’t have full faith that 6 a.m. is the time tomorrow.”
“Shame on PG&E for having this happen,” said District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey. “This is a company that has had a lot of reliability issues and the jury is out on what happened, but if this is negligence, I think it’s going to be really important for people to understand they have rights as customers.”
Leaders encourage everyone who lost anything to file a claim with PG&E; they could be eligible for reimbursements. Mahmood is calling for a hearing after the new year to get some answers for PG&E.
“What went wrong, why weren’t they able to address it this weekend and what steps are they taking to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” said Mahmood about the question he has for the utility company.
PG&E said the outage happened after a fire at its Mission Street substation left significant damage, but the cause is still under investigation.
Meanwhile, Menon has been refreshing social media looking for good news, but she’s starting to lose faith.
“They’re really doing nothing to help us here, so I’m losing hope,” said Menon.
A fire at a Pacific Gas & Electric substation in SoMa knocked out power to as many as 130,000 customers starting Saturday, leaving thousands in the dark heading into the holiday season and a week of intense storms. Here’s what we know about the outage and state of restoration.
What happened?
The fire began shortly before 1:10 p.m. Saturday at PG&E’s Mission substation at Eighth and Mission streets, initially affecting 40,000 customers. As firefighters worked to suppress the blaze, crews de-energized additional portions of the electric system for safety, causing outages to peak at approximately 130,000 customers.
The fire damaged critical equipment, including a circuit breaker — a safety switch designed to de-energize the system when problems are detected. Firefighters faced unusual complexities suppressing the fire in the multilevel building, including ventilating carbon monoxide before crews could safely enter.
When did power come back?
Firefighters made the building safe for PG&E crews to enter by 6:15 p.m. Saturday. Restoration efforts began immediately. Nearly 32,000 customers were reconnected by 8:45 p.m. Saturday, and about 100,000 — roughly 75% of those affected — were up by 9:30 p.m.
By noon Sunday, 90% of affected customers had power restored. PG&E initially projected full restoration by 2 p.m. Monday; however, a spokesperson said the utility was extending restoration times (opens in new tab) for the remaining 4,400 customers without power. No time frame has been announced.
What sparked the fire?
PG&E says it doesn’t know. COO Sumeet Singh said Monday that the extensive equipment damage makes it difficult to determine a root cause. The utility has hired Exponent, a Bay Area-based engineering firm, to conduct an independent investigation.
“We will determine what occurred to ensure it never happens again,” Singh said at a press conference outside the damaged substation.
Was the equipment properly maintained?
PG&E completed preventative maintenance at the Mission substation in October and conducted its most recent bimonthly inspection Dec. 5. Singh said neither inspection identified any problems.
Why were the estimated restoration times wrong?
Many customers were irate as they were repeatedly given estimated restoration times that came and went. Singh acknowledged the failure and said PG&E’s estimation systems typically perform well, with more than 91% accuracy systemwide.
“It obviously did not work effectively in the circumstance over this weekend,” Singh said. “We are committed to understanding exactly what happened, why it happened, and owning the fixes.”
Were other substations damaged?
Residents have observed a large presence of workers at a substation at 24th Avenue and Balboa Street since Sunday, but the utility has not shared details on what is being done there.
Six hulking diesel generators, which one worker said cost $600,000 to operate daily, were parked outside the substation Monday afternoon. The generators are needed to feed power to the grid while both substations are not fully operational. Crews said they are expected to run for at least two to three days.
Two workers said the substation is undamaged and still online, but its output is diminished because it is fed power by the much larger substation at Eighth and Mission.
However, another said one of the substation’s transformers blew out after a power surge following the fire, and the generators are needed to compensate while workers “update the system” of the west-side substation.
How will customers be compensated?
PG&E plans to offer an expedited claims process for affected customers to seek compensation for losses, including spoiled food, lost business revenue, and hotel costs. Singh said details will be available soon on the utility’s website and through customer service.
He declined to specify compensation limits or provide immediate financial relief, saying customers would need to file claims that PG&E would process quickly. The utility opened a community resource center in the Richmond and partnered with 211 to provide hotel accommodations and food vouchers for vulnerable customers.
Could this happen again?
Singh said PG&E has identified no vulnerabilities at other substations and has made significant upgrades systemwide. Two strong storms forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday (opens in new tab) could bring 4 to 10 inches of rain to Northern California; he said more than 5,500 PG&E workers and contractors are positioned to respond.
The outage occurred 22 years to the day (opens in new tab) after a mass blackout at the same substation in 2003, raising questions about aging infrastructure that Singh did not directly address.
Good morning. Extremely lean and mean (well, merry, really) for the rest of this week as we head into our annual winter break.
We’ll hang things up for the year on Dec. 24 and pick things back up on Jan. 5.
Happy holidays. (Yippee-Ki-Yay.) —AN
Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Fortune Tech? Drop a line here.
What happened when Waymo robotaxis met a San Francisco blackout
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu/Getty Images
An extraordinary experiment happened over the weekend in San Francisco.
What would a fleet of autonomous vehicles do when a widespread power outage knocked out traffic lights across one-third of the city?
We quickly found out—and the results were plastered all over social media.
On Saturday afternoon, Waymo vehicles throughout SF opted to stop where they were or pull over and throw on their hazard lights—“blocking intersections” and “compounding gridlock,” observed the San Francisco Standard—leading the Alphabet-owned robotaxi operator to suspend service throughout the city. (It resumed Sunday evening.)
In a statement, Waymo said that its vehicles are “designed to treat non-functional signals as four-way stops” but “the sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual.”
As locals worked through the outage, a moderate debate about the robotaxi fleet continued online. Was it so wrong to expect Waymo’s vehicles to play it safe when infrastructure stopped working? After all, aren’t human drivers predictably chaotic when things go sideways? What exactly should robotaxis optimize for: traffic flow or citizen safety?
And: Just how safe is stopping if you prompt traffic to go around you?
Waymo resumed service Sunday evening, no doubt grappling with these questions (and what city officials might have to say about them). “We are already learning and improving from this event,” it said. —AN
More tech
—Pirates scrape Spotify. Activists Anna’s Archive release hundreds of terabytes of music and metadata via torrent files.
—Shield AI: Sitting at a global inflection point for fully autonomous warfighting.
—SoftBank cashes out to back OpenAI. The Japanese conglomerate is looking under every rock to fulfill its “all in” OpenAI funding promise.
—Chaos at CISA. A failed, unsanctioned polygraph by its acting director has the U.S. cybersecurity agency in disarray.
—PE firms acquire Clearwater Analytics for $8.4 billion. Permira and Warburg Pincus lead the investor group seeking to buy the fintech firm.
—Uber goes to London. A robotaxi trial in partnership with Baidu will begin in the first half of next year.
—Data center deals reach $61 billion worldwide in 2025, according to S&P Global.
—Chatbots’ uncanny valley. Making AI agents more human-like creates cognitive dissonance and trust issues, researchers say.
—Daylight between David Sacks and tech lobbyists. Tech reps say the AI czar’s push to use Trump’s executive order to suppress state AI regulation is the right idea, wrong execution.
Is USPS breaking vow not to use Sacramento for Northern Nevada mail?
N.H. city’s refusal to fly ‘Save Women’s Sports’ and ‘An Appeal to Heaven’ flags is unconstitutional, appeals court rules – The Boston Globe
Devils Shake Up Forward Lines on Island; Markstrom Starts | PREVIEW | New Jersey Devils
Tuesday morning forecast
Near The Coast Of North Carolina Is A Serene Suburb With Fun Shops And Wilmington Proximity – Islands
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Video: ‘It Didn’t Have to Happen This Way:’ U.Va. Faculty Call for Review of Police Response to Protests
404 | Fox News
Trump says Greenland ‘essential’ for security: Could he take it by force?
BBC Verify: Satellite image shows tanker seized by US near Venezuela is now off Texas
20% of NYC mayor-elect Mamdani transition appointees have anti-Zionist ties: ADL
Exclusive: Former MEP Kaili doubles down on ‘Belgiangate’
-
Iowa1 week agoAddy Brown motivated to step up in Audi Crooks’ absence vs. UNI
-
Maine1 week agoElementary-aged student killed in school bus crash in southern Maine
-
Maryland1 week agoFrigid temperatures to start the week in Maryland
-
New Mexico7 days agoFamily clarifies why they believe missing New Mexico man is dead
-
South Dakota1 week agoNature: Snow in South Dakota
-
Detroit, MI1 week ago‘Love being a pedo’: Metro Detroit doctor, attorney, therapist accused in web of child porn chats
-
Health1 week ago‘Aggressive’ new flu variant sweeps globe as doctors warn of severe symptoms
-
Maine7 days agoFamily in Maine host food pantry for deer | Hand Off