Officials criticized PG&E and called for a hearing after a report released Friday found that PG&E failed to repair damage to a major substation one month before it went ablaze in December, leaving 120,000 San Francisco customers without power.

The 70-page report (opens in new tab), conducted by the engineering firm Exponent, found that condensation from rainy weather, along with damage to a piece of electrical insulation, caused two contacts on a breaker to arc, triggering the fire. The utility failed to adequately inspect or repair the faulty part, described as an “incident insulating board.”

The ensuing blackout left homes without electricity for days and cost businesses and restaurants lost revenue during a crucial holiday weekend. Residents couldn’t flush toilets, holiday events were canceled, and restaurants were forced to throw out spoiled food. 

Making the situation worse, Waymo vehicles stalled more than 1,500 times during the outage, forcing the company to dispatch tow trucks to retrieve 64 cars while overwhelmed city dispatchers — kept on hold for as long as 53 minutes — scrambled to clear blocked intersections. Meanwhile, residents complained that PG&E estimates for power restoration were wildly inaccurate.  

PG&E CEO Sumeet Singh told The Standard the company had no indication the substation was vulnerable to a fire. “We did not have any indications. There were no early warning indicators,” he said Friday. 

No PG&E employees have been disciplined.

It was not the first failure at the substation: A 2003 fire led to a $6.5 million state fine (opens in new tab), and it also caught fire in 1996 (opens in new tab). PG&E has issued $200 credits to residential customers and $2,500 to businesses, totaling roughly $50 million with damage claims.

Supervisor Alan Wong, who represents the Sunset, which was one of the last neighborhoods to have power restored in December, called for a hearing to convene Thursday at the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee to ask PG&E whether the blaze and blackout could have been prevented and how to do so in the future.

“The larger issue is reliability and resilience,” Wong said. “No matter what sparked this incident, a single fire at one facility should not have been able to disrupt power for more than 120,000 San Franciscans across multiple neighborhoods. The public deserves to know not just what failed that day but whether our critical infrastructure has the redundancy, safeguards, and resilience a city like San Francisco should be able to count on.”

Gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer criticized PG&E and pledged to break up the utility if elected. PG&E has given more than $10 million to a political action committee opposing the billionaire’s campaign.

State Sen. Scott Wiener called the report “damning” and said it affirmed the importance of San Francisco creating a public utility. Cities that have done so tend to have lower electricity prices.

“This report makes clear what we’ve long known: San Francisco needs to break up with PG&E and form our own publicly owned utility accountable to the people, not Wall Street,” Wiener said.

He introduced a bill to break up PG&E, SB 875, but it was blocked last month by the state Senate’s Energy Committee. 

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi likewise affirmed her position of creating a public utility  but admitted that she hadn’t yet read the report because she was attending Friday’s memorial for labor leader Larry Mazzola (opens in new tab).

“I’ve always been a supporter of public power,” she said.

Mayor Daniel Lurie declined to comment, saying he hadn’t read the report, and declined to take a position on whether San Francisco should break up with PG&E and create its own public utility, saying he needs “to look at the issue more.” 

“We need them to continue to invest in their infrastructure. We can’t continue to see failures like that. It hurts our small businesses. It hurts our city,” Lurie said of PG&E.

As a reason for not taking a stance, the mayor pointed to ongoing litigation that may influence moves by the city to take over PG&E’s infrastructure.

John Cote, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, described PG&E as a “middleman” that owns only the wires and poles that deliver power the city already generates.

The commission operates two programs, Clean Power SF and Hetch Hetchy Power, that create 75% of the energy San Francisco uses by operating the Hetch Hetchy dam and buying wind and solar energy. Hetch Hetchy Power provides electricity to government agencies and buildings (opens in new tab), including San Francisco General Hospital and Muni, while Clean Power SF has 385,000 residential and commercial customers, who receive power bought by the city through PG&E’s transmission lines.

“The city of San Francisco’s successful history as a public power provider stands in stark contrast to PG&E’s long record of failures, bankruptcies, and skyrocketing rates,” Cote said. “This report just underscores PG&E’s poor operations and failure to reinvest in a system that San Franciscans rely on every day.”

Other officials described PG&E as acting carelessly in not preventing the conditions that led to the fire.

“I would have expected a $35 billion company to have monitored something as basic as humidity levels. This raises serious concerns about the safety and conditions of PG&E facilities,” said Supervisor Danny Sauter.

Supervisor Matt Dorsey, whose district includes the substation, said reading the report felt like “déjà vu.”

“I think there’s more analysis to be done on root causes, but in my view it’s par for the course for PG&E — disappointing but hardly surprising,” he said.