A power outage has affected the Hayward-Fremont Bart line. Hayward, South Hayward, Union City, and Fremont are all feeling the powerlessness, and Bart is "currently working on setting up a bus bridge." In a shocking turn of events, even 511 has info on the outage.......

Oh, the joys of electricity. We in our satellite Sunnyside SFist office had been without it since 8:43 this morning. Power was finally restored at 4:20 (hot!). We immediately plugged in our computer and iPhone and powered up. We couldn't believe all that we missed today! Britney losing her kids, Brazil losing some alligators, Gay tax breaks - wow! It's amazing how "wired" we've become. It makes moments like the one pictured above seem......

As the last night of Hanukkah approaches, we would like to take this opportunity to reflect on this past week's Jewy events and provide a few tidbits of what we shiksas have learned from this year's celebration. 1. Hanukkah has multiple spellings: Hanukkah, Hanukka, Chanuka, and Chanukah. 2. It's important to double check (using a calendar, not a person) which is the actual first night of Hanukkah. We accidentally lit our first candles on Monday,......

Here's todays news...

Official friend of SFist Irene McGee-- ex dj at Free FM (KIFR 106.9) and, yes, "Real World" alum and recipient of "the Slap Heard 'Round the World"-- is having a benefit tonight at the Red Devil lounge to raise money for her after she lost pretty much everything (including one of her cats) in a fire. To help her raise money, she has some fairly heavy weights to help her out-- Exene Cervenka formerly of X and Ben Fong-Torres and Kitten on the Keys will be your emcee for the night. Show starts at 8 and tickets are $15. ...

That power outage at SFO yesterday was from a switch failure, not PG&E. PG&E, though, still has to take the blame for that explosion in Chinatown yesterday too. An 8-month-old girl is safe after being dropped from the second-story window of a burning apartment in Sunnyvale. A neighbor had pulled underneath the window in a pickup truck and caught the baby, and then caught the mother safely in the cab of the truck as she......

-There was a power outage at SFO last night for about an hour. -And there was an explosion somewhere underground in Chinatown that led to evacuations. Nobody was hurt but the area reeked of gas. ...

-The high rate of African American being arrested in San Francisco make some call for an inquiry. -Matier and Ross say Gavin's Chief of Staff, Steve Kawa, left due to burnout. We had "intern problem" in the office pool. ...

Doh! A man trying to rob a local Oakland liquor store accidentally shot himself in the leg during the robbery, and died later from his injuries. The robber had placed the gun on the counter so he could take the money, but when putting the gun back into his waistband, accidentally fired. The whole sad scene was caught on a security camera, where we're sure it'll end up on America's Most Unfortunate Home Videos soon.......

Tough few days in SoMa -- the mysterious power outage yesterday and today, a four-alarm fire above the Olympic restaurant at Fifth and Clara that's required the CHP to close down the Fifth Street 101 onramp and close down traffic on Fifth and on Harrison. (What a dramatic way for Eve to start her first day at the Chron, which is just a few blocks down the street! Stop, drop, and roll, Eve!) The Olympic......

We've always wondered what would happen if there was a power outage somewhere in Silicon Valley. Would the stock market crash? Would we not be able to surf porn? Would we no longer be able to download "Buffy" reruns over iTunes? Well, we're about to find out as there's a blackout in one of the hearts of Silicon Valley, that being San Mateo County. ...

BART was delayed today for more than an hour and a half as once again there was a power outage. This time the outage was caused not by a Temp, but by a BART train traveling from Balboa Park to Daly City striking a piece of metal on the track. No word as to what the piece of metal was or where it was from or whether any motherf------ snakes were involved. ...

It's gettin'... it's gettin'... it's gettin' kinda hectic. BART was held up this morning for about an hour due to-- drum roll please-- a contractors mistake. Yay!!! We totally had snakes on the train as the cause of the delay in this morning's SFist Office Pool. Anyways, what happened was a contractor (no word yet on whether or not they are now considered to be an "ex-contractor") accidentally punctured a water line and the punctured water line showed up as a power outage on the computer. Et viola, the computer shut down the system thinking there was no power anymore. This all happened around 7:15 this morning and was fixed slightly after 8. BART was still playing catch-up last we heard and the roads were little more traffic laden than normal. See what happens when you hire temps? ...

Four unrelated shootings in San Francisco over the long Labor Day weekend -- one at 24th and Alabama, one at Turk and Laguna, one at Harrison and 1st, and one in Visitacion Valley near the Cow Palace. Two victims are dead, two are in the hospital. PG&E announced that it figured out why that generator blew the other week underneath the Ralph Lauren store -- water leaked into the transformer, which caused an electrical short, which then blew up oil in the chamber used for insulation. Who uses oil for insulation? (Okay, engineers, enlighten us.) In other news, another transformer blew up on Market Street due to a failed cable splice, there was a power outage near UCSF when a tree blew into some power lines, and another outage in the Outer Mission when a car drove into a pole. And celebrating Labor Day the old-school way, 61 union members were arrested outside the Grand Hyatt at a sit-in over the year-long hotel strike. The union organizers have agreed to end the boycott against the Westin St. Francis because the WSF management has agreed to support several of the union's key demands. ...

We knew that bag of 100 IKEA tea lights would come in handy one of these days! Yet another fire at that same PG&E substation that keeps bursting into flames blacked out 22,000 customers in San Francisco on Saturday night. You may remember this substation as the same one that caught on fire on the last shopping day before Christmas in 2003, was left to burn for 2 hours as PG&E went into denial about the whole thing, caused a huge blackout throughout the city for over 24 hours, and was blamed for single-handedly ruining merchants' sales for the entire year (at a cost of $4 million)? PG&E claims they've learned from the past and called this one in as soon as the smoke alarm went off. (Can't slip anything by those folks.) However, the SF Fire Department is annoyed that PG&E told them it was okay to fight the fire with water, claiming that the fire was not water-safe, the water caused a huge explosion and increased the scope of the power outage, and fire fighters might well have been killed. PG&E, after first saying that this sort of thing should be expected when you're fighting fires in the first place, is now claiming no explosion actually happened. Hm. Any good blackout stories? We can report that we were in the Haight, where we didn't notice a single thing out of the ordinary because Amoeba Records was lit up like Christmas. Does Amoeba have its own generator or something? Picture of PG&E substation from ABC 7...

A bright flash; the lights dimmed; and then the loudest explosion we've ever heard. A transformer at the corner of Fulton and Stanyan just blew up, and there's a six-block chunk of city that's completely dark. Good thing we're compelled to buy the jumbo bag of tea lights every time we visit Ikea! We hope you like the accompanying JPEG we managed to get of PG&E assessing the damage about 5 minutes ago; you......

Of course, any sort of discussion about flooding caused by rain in these here parts must always be tempered by what happened in South-East Asia, but due to all the almost biblical amount of rain going down in the area, flooding is becoming a problem. Today, parts of the Embarcadero were closed and huge parts of Marin were completely covered in water. Which, of course, meant huge traffic jams onto the Golden Gate Bridge and......