Big question: Why can 1 substation cripple S.F? by Julie Chao, Erin McCormick, Elizabeth Fernandez and Anastasia Hendrix -- George Raine, Larry D. Hatfield and Seth Rosenfeld of The Examiner staff contributed to this report San Francisco Examiner, December 9, 1998 The California Public Utilities Commission and the state's newly formed grid-operating Independent System Operator say they will be looking into the electrical failure that darkened San Francisco and much of San Mateo County for more than six hours Tuesday. The massive failure, which could cost PG&E millions of dollars in damages because of expected claims, drew complaints from the Board of Supervisors and criticism of the PG&E's management at a time when the utility industry is dramatically changing. "I think the larger lesson here is: What's going on with this company?" said Nettie Hoge, director of the nonprofit consumer group The Utility Rate Network. The power failure was caused, PG&E said, by simple human error, but it threw the northern Peninsula into chaos and highlighted the vulnerability of The City's power grid and our high-tech life. E-mail, voicemail, answering machines, faxes and coffee makers all went dead thanks to a PG&E worker who forgot to do something elementary: remove a grounding wire before restarting the power. "Grounding is a pretty basic procedure," said Carl Bellone, PG&E's director of distribution operations. "It's as basic as it gets." Because of the error, 435,481 PG&E customers - or about a million and a half people - lost power for anywhere from two to seven hours in San Francisco and San Mateo County. San Francisco resident Sarah Killgore, 75, was killed by a hit-and-run driver who didn't stop at an intersection that had no working traffic light. As of Wednesday morning, PG&E had no information on the number of claims filed or the amount of damages sought. Spokesman Cory Warren said, "It's company policy to settle claims promptly and fairly." Hoge cited a litany of recent PG&E problems, including a blackout sparked by someone who tampered with the controls in a Mission Street electricity substation last year and a 1997 jury decision that the company bore responsibility for a 500-acre forest fire in the Sierra. "This ought to be strike three," Hoge said. "You can't blame an act of God." She said she didn't believe Tuesday's blackout was the fault of the recent electric industry deregulation, but was simply an example of bad management. "This may have been human error, but who was supervising the human?" she said. The PG&E crew responsible for the power failure was doing routine maintenance at a San Mateo substation. Grounding wires, which are about as thick as a man's thumb, are normally put in after the power is turned off to protect workers. They are removed when the work is completed. But one of the workers failed to remove the wires before power was restarted, triggering a massive short circuit and causing two San Francisco power plants and 25 substations to automatically shut down. The unidentified workers in the four-person construction crew will "go through the normal discipline process," said PG&E President and CEO Gordon Smith. He declined to elaborate. Although the error was simple, the location was crucial. "(San Mateo) is a very critical substation; it's the biggest one" on the Peninsula, said Bellone. "They don't all feed downtown San Francisco." The Embarcadero, for instance, generally kept power because it is fed by a separate 230-kilovolt line that was not affected. Parts of the western Peninsula and The City also were on different circuits and were not affected. That one substation could wipe out almost an entire major city highlights San Francisco's geographic isolation at the upper tip of a peninsula. Most other cities are fed power from many sources and from several directions. But because San Francisco is bordered by water on three sides, its power comes only from what it generates at its own plants - at Potrero Hill and Hunters Point - and from plants on the Peninsula and in San Jose. "In terms of lessons learned . . . it's worth revisiting the question: Is San Francisco inherently necessarily that isolated, or is there something we can do about that," said Ron Knecht, president of the Economic and Technical Analysis Group, an energy consulting firm in The City. PG&E's Smith said the company would be looking closely at transmission upgrades. "Short of building an underwater transmission line to the east or to the north, which is incredibly expensive, we can probably do a better job of making sure (we have better) transmission capability coming up the Peninsula," he said. Tom Ammiano, incoming president of the Board of Supervisors, said he would ask for an investigation into PG&E's possible legal liability for damages, particularly to small business operators. He said he would write to PG&E on behalf of the board asking for an explanation of the power failure and then refer the matter to The City's Public Utilities Commission. "I saw restaurants all along Market Street out of business, losing their lunchtime clientele," he said. "I'm sure the losses were in the millions." Mayor Brown said police, fire and other emergency services personnel had to be brought in, at great expense to The City, to keep The City from sliding into chaos. He said The City would file a claim to recover those costs from PG&E. Mark Ziering, manager of California Public Utilities Commission's Energy Reliability Team, said state overseers might look into why the problem had been able to spread so far without any backup plan to stop it and why it had taken so long to recover power. "In general, if you lose one system, the rest of the power chain should be able to survive," he said. Ziering said that while PUC regulators were looking into the power failure, it had not been decided whether they would conduct a formal investigation. Patrick Dorinson, spokesman for the California Independent System Operator, the newly formed organization that manages the power transmission grid interconnecting the entire state, pointed out that the Bay Area's problems had not threatened to knock out power to the whole state, like the August 1996 failure that started in Idaho and wiped out power to 11 western states. While the 1996 power failure created a cascading effect - power stations going out one after another - Tuesday's had a natural terminating point: it had nowhere to go after hitting San Francisco. However, he said, his organization would also be reviewing Tuesday's problem. "You always have to be concerned though, because everything is interconnected," said Dorinson. Mayor Brown openly criticized PG&E, which had told him Tuesday morning that power would be restored in 45 minutes. "They missed their target," he said. "I would assume that you would have some kind of backup plan when this kind of human error could cause this kind of inconvenience." Smith went to The City's command center to apologize to Brown and city officials. PG&E said power restoration lagged in some locations because of the time-consuming nature of the work. "You physically have to move switches," said spokesman Leonard Anderson. "It takes time. Dozens of switches have to be thrown, knobs have to be turned, switches have to be moved. It's mechanical." Although most agreed the blackout was not directly related to the deregulation of the energy industry - in which power generation will open up to competition - activist Harvey Rosenfield, a vocal opponent of key components of the deregulation, said that there could be a correlation. As companies like PG&E rush to reorganize to become more profitable, the public will "have to wait and see what the impact of that will have on the important questions like safety, reliability and quality" of the system, Rosenfield said. Businesses that suffered financial losses can file a claim with PG&E by calling 1-800-743-5000 or by going through its Web site at http://www.pge.com. But the fact that PG&E sits in judgment on claims disturbs former state Sen. Quentin Kopp, now practicing law in San Francisco. He said Tuesday he had for years objected to PG&E's procedure for assessing damage claims from consumers stemming from power failures or other incidents. "That's supreme arrogance," said Kopp, who in 1996 proposed legislation that would have allowed consumers to be reimbursed by PG&E in a kind of small claims court in which the California Public Utilities Commission, and not PG&E, acted as judges. The Legislature approved a watered-down version of the bill but Gov. Wilson vetoed it. Kopp had acted after a series of serious winter storms caused widespread power failures and many of his constituents lost the contents of their refrigerators. He said there might be a case made against the utility for "perhaps emotional distress, certainly property damage, the loss of income." While there were no reports of road rage, looting or other bad human behavior Tuesday, psychologists agreed that blackouts could indeed be emotionally distressing, especially as the world we live in becomes increasingly wired. "We are so tethered to mother electricity, mother PG&E," said Lauren Wonder, spokeswoman for the California Psychological Association. "When these things are cut, we are stranded. We take modern amenities for granted. When big outages happen, we go back to being a primitive culture." Dr. Bernard Sjoberg, director of the Phobia Counseling Center in San Jose, said major power failures tended to trigger three different types of behavior. In some people, electrical failures stimulate creativity. "These people see a challenge in a problem," said Sjoberg, a clinical psychologist. "They'll use a crowbar to get out of their garage if they're stuck." Some people see blackouts as "an opportunity to overthrow the constraints that keep society together. They loot, they break windows." For other people, a temporary public emergency becomes a personal crisis. "They see disruption of any part of their daily routine as catastrophic," he said. "They think what are other consequences, what if the water goes out or what if their children can't get home? They have panic attacks, they make themselves nonfunctional and depressed."
