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. 

What happened?

When did power come back?

What sparked the fire?

Was the equipment properly maintained?

Why were the estimated restoration times wrong?

Were other substations damaged?

How will customers be compensated?

Could this happen again?

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

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What happened when Waymo robotaxis met a San Francisco blackout

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

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