The California Public Utilities Commission announced Monday it has launched formal investigations into two large power outages in San Francisco that originated in the same Pacific Gas and Electric substation.
The most recent fire, which affected thousands of San Francisco customers, occurred at PG&E's Mission substation on Saturday, the same place where a December 2003 outage and fire originated.
Saturday's outage affected 23,461 PG&E customers and began around 7 p.m. when a circuit breaker caught fire, PG&E spokesman Paul Moreno said today. Power was restored to all customers by midnight. The root cause of the fire has not yet been determined and PG&E continues to investigate, Moreno said.
The outage on Dec. 20, 2003, affected more than 100,000 customers and PG&E determined the root cause was an electric cable failure. Following its investigation, PG&E replaced all of its cables, installed smoke detecting equipment and changed procedures so that the company could respond immediately to indications of equipment failure, Moreno said.
"What occurred on Saturday night shows that those practices work," Moreno said Monday.
But prior to Saturday's outage, PG&E was already under scrutiny from the Public Utilities Commission for failing to implement its own recommendations following an investigation into a 1996 fire at the Mission substation, a spokeswoman for the commission said Monday.
When the 2003 outage and fire occurred, PG&E did not have smoke detectors nor did it have written procedures for coordinating emergency fire response, even though both precautions were recommended following the 1996 fire, spokeswoman Terri Prosper said Monday.
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