In a press conference yesterday afternoon, Mayor Lee called Monday night's power outage at Candlestick Park "a national embarrassment." This is, of course, the same Mayor Lee who once called PG&E "a great company that gets it". Unfortunately, PG&E still doesn't seem to get how their lines could be responsible for the outage that put tens of thousands of football fans in the dark and delayed a nationally televised football game.

According to KTVU, PG&E CEO Anthony Earley told Mayor Lee yesterday morning that the power outage was not, in fact, caused by an exploding transformer as the company previously explained, but rather a "splice failure" in a power line outside the ballpark. We're not going to pretend like we know what a splice failure is (something to do with the connection between two lines, we imagine), but according to PG&E spokesman Jason King, that bright blue flash seen on ESPN's aerial footage [below] was actually an electrical arc that sparked when the line came down. Earlier yesterday, King tried to pin the blame on a city-owned automatic transfer switch. By the end of the day PG&E was covering their ass, claiming "It's not been concluded that there's been an issue with the switch."

The Public Utilities Commission, on the other hand, finally weighed in when General Manager Ed Harrington explained that the switch did its job of kicking in a second backup electrical feed and, "the power feed was clearly a problem of when [PG&E's] line broke." PG&E, for their part, maintained that there were no signs their equipment was to blame, even after admitting it was their line that fell apart.

Previously: PG&E Changes Its Mind, Blames Candlestick Outage On The City
[KTVU]