Thousands of San Francisco residents lost power Thursday afternoon after an unplanned PG&E outage swept through the Tenderloin, Lower Nob Hill, and Western Addition neighborhoods, the latest in a string of blackouts that has rattled the city for months. The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management reported the outage affected around 3,182 PG&E customers, posting an update just after 3:30 p.m.
The blackout came just hours after a far more dramatic incident shook downtown San Francisco: an underground electrical fire triggered explosions in four PG&E vaults on California Street in the Financial District early Thursday, forcing evacuations and shelter-in-place orders, according to the SF Standard. The Standard reported power outages lasting for hours Thursday morning. As KRON4 reported on the afternoon outage, customers are encouraged to visit PG&E's outage center for real-time updates, outage maps, and estimated restoration times, or call 1-800-743-5002 for assistance.
A Second Blackout in Two Days
Thursday's outage wasn't an isolated glitch. A similar outage took out power along the San Francisco Embarcadero for several hours just a day earlier, on September 30. That prior disruption, which SFGATE reported cut power to roughly 455 customers around the Ferry Building and disabled traffic signals along the Embarcadero for more than three hours, was covered in Hoodline's Ferry Building outage report.
The two outages occurred on consecutive days in San Francisco. The October 1 blackout followed a disruption along the Embarcadero on September 30.
Grid Maintenance and Public Power
PG&E's maintenance record has also drawn scrutiny following a massive December 20, 2025 outage that knocked out power for 120,000 San Francisco residents. An independent investigation by engineering firm Exponent, completed in May 2026, found the outage was caused by a Mission Substation fire stemming from high humidity condensation and a damaged insulating board that workers had identified a month earlier but never replaced, the SF Standard reported.
The Push for Public Power
The repeated outages have fueled a political fight over who should control San Francisco's electric grid. On September 22, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the environmental review for the city's proposed $2.5 billion acquisition of PG&E's local electric distribution grid under the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, according to the SFPUC.
City officials have pressed the utility before. In a formal letter sent March 12, 2026, San Francisco officials called on PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe and state regulators at the California Public Utilities Commission to investigate the company's local safety record and grid reliability. The SFPUC says it provides more than 75% of the electricity used in San Francisco through Hetch Hetchy Power and CleanPowerSF, while PG&E owns and operates most of the city's electrical grid.
PG&E has pushed back hard against the buyout. In filings with the California Public Utilities Commission, the company has argued that separating San Francisco's grid from the regional network would be extraordinarily complex and would force local customers to pay higher electric rates for decades to come.
What Drivers Should Know
As with previous outages, dark traffic signals pose a real hazard for drivers navigating affected intersections. Under California law, drivers who encounter an unpowered traffic signal during an outage must stop and proceed according to right-of-way rules.
This remains a developing story, and Hoodline will update as PG&E provides restoration estimates. Just before 7 p.m., about 312 customers remained without power.
