San Francisco Goes Dark For Seven hours

San Francisco: A San Francisco power outage which lasted for seven hours stranded people in elevators and left tens of thousands of others in the dark was caused by the massive failure of a circuit breaker that sparked a fire at a power substation, a utility company spokesman said.

An outage that began late in the morning on Friday and continued into the afternoon cut power to about 88,000 customers in the busy heart of the city, according to Pacific Gas and Electric spokesman Paul Doherty. He posted online just after power had been restored, "We deeply apologize for the inconvenience this has caused around the city, we know it was an equipment failure. It is premature to speculate on a specific cause."

The fire department also tweeted that they received more than 100 calls, 20 of them related to people trapped in elevators.

During the outage, traffic lights were out of service and shops plunged into darkness. The city's iconic cable cars were taken out of service as a precaution since streetlights were not operating on large parts of their routes and they also closed the Bay Area Rapid Transit agency's downtown Montgomery Station. People used the lights of their cellphones to walk through the darkened station before service was restored.

Some cafes or shops around the city continued to serve customers, with people using cash or mobile payment services such as Square that let credit or debit cards be processed through smartphones or tablets.

People were confused about what was going on and what to do, said Pam Martinez, a 25-year-old San Francisco resident and software engineer who was on a train when she heard the announcement that her destination station was closed.

By shortly after 4 pm (local time), electricity had been restored to all.