More than one hundred thousand San Francisco residents lost power on Saturday afternoon as sweeping power outages affected large areas of the densely populated Northern California city.
PG&E’s Outage Center initially reported that 24,842 customers were affected, but minutes later the utility told NBC Bay Area the number had climbed to 39,520 households. By 4 p.m., the number of affected households and businesses had grown to 125,000, or about 30% of the city. The outage impacted areas including the Mission, Richmond, Sunset, Presidio, Haight, Golden Gate Park and parts of downtown.
San Francisco Fire Lt. Mariano Elias said at least some of the blackouts were caused when a fire broke out inside a PG&E substation in the Mission district at about 2:15 p.m., according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Employees reported smoke inside the four-story building as fire crews extinguished the flames on the first floor, Elias said…