33 Hours Later: The Great SF Power Outage

The lights in our Civic Center apartment started flickering around 1:15 PM on Saturday afternoon. The power for our entire four-story building went out around 1:30 PM.

I walked through the neighborhood to see if it was only our building that was affected, but local businesses on Grove Street were without power too.

The Main Branch of the SF Public Library was busy clearing out patrons from their darkened building on Grove Street.

A touring production of the musical "Moulin Rouge" at the Orpheum Theater was shut down after the first act, with a promise of refunds.

For some reason, there was also a giddy looking group of firemen assisting patrons out of the theater.

To add to the mayhem, there was a rescue of some sort happening on Jones Street a block away...

...along with a barricaded shooter situation at the Palace Hotel which stopped all Muni bus traffic for a while.

At Fourth and Market, the Ross Dress for Less store was being evacuated.

One of the oddest details of the afternoon, besides the gentleman above in some kind of Christmas diaper fetish outfit, was how random and sporadic the outages were downtown.

The north side of Market Street towards Union Square was fully powered, including the Winter Wonderland event on a closed-off Stockton Street, where people were posing with Princess Peach from the Mario Brothers videogame...

...and volunteers were glueing seeds and flowers to little sections of a Rose Parade float sponsored by the City of San Francisco this year.

Night arrived early for the Winter Solstice and we tried to take a walk, but it was frankly terrifying because most of the traffic signal lights in the Civic Center neighborhood were out and crossing a street as a pedestrian felt perilous.

To add to the apocalyptic feel of the outage, Waymo robot taxis were having nervous breakdowns all over the city. They would stop at an intersection, confused there were no traffic signals, and just sit there blocking traffic for long periods of time. In the photo above, the police took quite a while to realize that the Waymo in front of them wasn't going to move, so it slowly went around the vehicle. However, the police car's flashing lights must have signaled something to the robot taxi, and it joined the police vehicle in crossing the intersection, but then started weaving like a drunk as it made its way up Franklin Street.

Sunday dawned without any restoration of power in the neighborhood, and those who seemed to have it worst were the luxury skyscraper inhabitants at 100 Van Ness, where they didn't even have running water because the plumbing system there is electronically controlled. Quite a few of them were waiting outside late Sunday afternoon to be driven to hotels. Around 10:45 PM the power was restored to our building, and for continuing excitement on Monday we now get to look forward to possible flooding from the Pineapple Express barreling in over the Pacific Ocean. Happy Winter Solstice.