It’s been six months since a third of San Francisco went dark – as long as three days in some neighborhoods – but one city supervisor says he’s still waiting for answers. A recent report found safety lapses leading up to the fire that triggered the mass outage of more than 120,000 custome rs. One expert who reviewed the findings for NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit believes the utility failed to heed warning signs of a potentially dangerous problem, just weeks before the fire started. The missed opportunity was discussed last month at a city Board of Supervisors committee hearing about what happened on Dec. 20th – but one supervisor says he was not happy with the utility’s responses. “I have lost confidence in PGE,” says Alan Wong, whose district includes the Richmond neighborhood, where businesses were hardest hit over three days. “I’m concerned about the future,” Wong said. “As somebody that’s in the National Guard, I’ve been deployed to wildfires,” he said. He served in battalion operations as a troop coordinator in the 2018 Camp Fire, that devastated the town of Paradise and claimed 84 lives. The fire was attributed by local prosecutors and state utility regulators on PGE’s failure to maintain an aging part of the grid. “I never want something like that to happen to San Francisco,” he said, adding he wants to know more about the utility’s conduct before, during and after the fire. “I feel that this is totally irresponsible.” San Francisco Feb 12 San Francisco supervisors demand answers from PGE on days-long blackout San Francisco Jan 20 San Francisco merchants announce lawsuit against PGE after December blackout San Francisco Jan 7 SF supes blast PGE, call for inquiry into public utility system after power outages The report by Exponent, an outside engineering firm brought in by PGE, found the fire only hit one compartment of this single utility cabinet in the substation. But the cabinet housed critical switching gear and banks of circuit breakers designed to protect the grid, so that small fire had a wide impact. “It’s lucky that no one was killed,” said veteran electrical engineer Ken Buske, who has investigated more than 1,000 fires and has been critical of PGE in the past. Buske reviewed the report’s findings for the investigative unit. He noted that while water conducts electricity, when combined with the dust that can settle on electrical equipment over time, it can create ideal conditions for a short-circuit, and fire. He says the Exponent report detailed an incident in November, just weeks before the fire, where crews found evidence of water, dust and short-circuiting on an insulation board inside the cabinet where the fire later broke out. Buske says PGE should have treated that discovery as an emergency. “You should be shutting down whatever you need to shut down then and there,” he said. But instead, according to the report, maintenance crews replaced some damaged gear andwiped down the cabinet insulation board, without taking further action. Missing, according to Buske, clear signs that water and dust had been getting in posed an ongoing risk of failure. “It was just waiting to happen,” he said. “It’s only a question of when and it wasn’t even going to be a long time until this happened.” At the hearing last month, Jake Zigelman, PGE’s executive in charge of the Bay Area region, briefed the board on Exponent’s findings. “There was no single factor that led to this outage, or the event,” he said. He said the crews who handled the first incident in November met industry standards after finding some limited damage that they believed didn’t compromise performance. But, he said, the report findings showed some lapses. “There is no doubt that the report identified some conditions that were unacceptable to us,” he said. “We own that, we are accountable for that, we need to do better.” Zigelman acknowledged the report’s conclusion that multiple systems designed to keep moist outside air and dust from settling on equipment weren’t functioning at the time of the fire. While the Exponent report couldn’t say where it came from, it did note that standing water was found in the basement, where “there does not appear to be an interior drain system.” In a statement, PGE said the substation had basement drains, and attributed what it called “small puddles” of water to “uneven floor surface.” San Francisco fire Chief Dean Crisem said in an assessment that the standing water crews found posed a “serious hazard” in handling the fire. The department also noted that crews had to wait in line to get CO2 tanks, because substation lacked an automatic carbon dioxide fire suppression system. “A better more robust extinguishment method is essential,” said Chief Crispen’s top aide in a memo to supervisors. Although PGE didn’t explain why some systems intended to keep water and dust out weren’t functioning, it told the investigative unit that it’s committed to pursue “all corrective measures’’ to avoid another fire, acting immediately to improve inspections, upgrade monitoring and provide added weather-related protections for its 16 indoor substations in the city. “I don’t believe any of their answers were sufficient,” Wong said after the hearing, adding that he wants to learn more to make sure PGE follows through on its promises, so the city is spared from another nightmare.“For me,’’ Wong said, “it’s not only about this incident, but ensuring that our small businesses and our residents are able to have commerce, to live their lives, and also to prevent such an incident from ever happening in the future.’’ ...read more read less