PGE did not call the San Francisco Fire Department until more than an hour after the first signs of trouble at the Mission Substation, according to the utility and San Francisco emergency dispatch records. PGE officials confirmed Monday the fire and outage began about the same time – about 1:09 p.m. on Saturday. “We identified an outage and dispatched crews to the substation to investigate,” the utility said in a statement. “According to travel time and their on-site assessment, they then followed notification procedures.” The exact same substation caught fire on Dec. 20, 2003, sparking a similar massive outage. In that wake of that case, the utility was criticized by regulators for not alerting fire officials in a timely fashion. Noting, back then, it took PGE two hours to call fire officials.. Dispatch recordings of the early moments of Saturday’s outage include reports of someone being trapped in an elevator near the substation – suggesting a power outage. The first call of a fire came at 2:16 p.m., the fire department said, triggered by someone apparently activating an alarm box on the street near the substation. PGE said Monday that its crews called 911 at 2:15 p.m. San Francisco fire records show four engines and two truck companies arrived at 2:20 p.m. A minute earlier, dispatchers advised responding crews “the exact cause of the fire is unknown,” according to the computer assisted dispatch record. Arriving crews said they didn’t see smoke at the street level but declared a working fire at 2:30 p.m. when they discovered light smoke after entering the building. After a quick assessment, crews exited and regrouped outside. They met with PGE officials already on scene and prepared a strategy to safely enter the basement of the structure, said fire spokesman Capt. Sam Menchaca. “Our crews worked very hard on this incident,” Menchaca said. “We had to make sure everyone was safely out of there,” he added, noting that crews faced a challenge of not knowing exactly where the fire was in the basement. “It was not clear what was burning,” Menchaca said, adding that hazmat-trained crews were summoned to the scene as well as a rapid intervention crew to be on standby. San Francisco Dec 23 Power fully restored in San Francisco, PGE says San Francisco Dec 23 PGE announces bill credits for San Francisco customers affected by massive outage Meanwhile, Sumeet Singh, chief operating officer and incoming CEO at PGE, said the utility discovered the fire had damaged a critical safety switch. The initial outage hit 40,000 customers, but ultimately PGE had to cut off 130,000 customers “to make it safe for the fire department to put out the fire.” After regrouping, hazmat crews went into the building. By 4:50 p.m., the specially equipped hazmat crews were able to douse the fire with carbon dioxide to suppress it, Menchaca said. “With any electrical fire, we can’t go to water right away – at 4:50, we had CO2 on the fire, and we got it knocked down. We needed to see if the fire was still burning. We considered it completely extinguished at 6:38.” For several minutes, Menchaca said, crews sought to make sure the lingering smoke was coming from the original fire and not another unknown location. ...read more read less