The involuntary three-day weekend caused the Friday, April 21 San Francisco blackout has already raised substantial ire toward California utility company and supervillain collective PG&E, and a newly acquired batch of fire department dispatch recordings seems unlikely to help that dynamic. In addition to providing laughably bogus initial information about how many customers were affected, costing local businesses millions, and “nonexistent” communication with the city during the blackout that powered down some 88,000 customers, some dispatch calls and radio communications unearthed by NBC Bay Area’s Jaxon Van Derbeken show a comedy errors that surely exacerbated the effects of the outage.

The explosive revelations in this NBC Bay Area report are mostly garden-variety corporate ineptitude, like slow-arriving PG&E staff or red tape that prevented firefighters from extinguishing the blaze. But one shocking blunder really stands out — that PG&E personnel at the Larkin Street substation, where an electrical fire caused the outage, simply locked the place up and abandoned their posts, leaving firefighters unable to go in to combat the blaze. To size up the scope, let's make a timeline of what we now know of that April morning, with transcripts of calls from fire department communications.




9 a.m. - Circuit breaker ignites at PG&E Larkin Street substation, blackout begins.

9:26 a.m. - SF Fire Department receives their first call on the fire, relayed to them via their own prevention bureau. “We got a call from PG&E — there’s a box over there at 600 Larkin….they say alarms are going off and they have smoke showing from their panels,” a prevention bureau officer says.

9:30 a.m. - First firefighters arrive, but they can’t get in to fight to fight the fire! PG&E employees (understandably) bolted from the building, but (bafflingly) locked it up and left the site. “They all left the building and it’s locked up at this moment,” a firefighter says to a dispatcher. “We’re waiting for a supervisor to respond out…to let us in.”

9:50 a.m. - Firefighters cannot locate the site supervisor, but find someone with keys. “We’ve got a guy back here with keys, so whenever you’re ready we can make entry,” a firefighter says to a commander.

“Yeah copy,” the commander replies. “We’re just waiting for the PG&E supervisor, so we’re just gonna hang out."

Are you facepalming yet?

9:53 a.m. - Firefighters find a guy with keys, but the commander still discourages them from entering to fight the fire. “It’s not me, these guys want to go in. I’m telling them they have to hold off, though.”

9:54 a.m. - Firefighters go ahead and break into the building anyway. “Hey Sal, we’re in here, putting the fire out,” says one.

The fire initially proves harder to put out than anticipated. “We’re hitting this with all our extinguishers and we’re getting more from PG&E,” reports another firefighter. “We knock it down, it seems to be coming back. We may want to get that CO2 Unit responding out here.”

10:25 - Forty of the above-mentioned CO2-fixed firefighting systems arrive. By then, the fire has more or less burnt out on its own. Never mind.

Some blame could be probably be assigned to the SFFD, but their overall performance looks like a mixed bag of go-getting heroism and bureaucratic laziness, depending on the personnel. PG&E, however, comes across quite poorly. “Quite frankly it’s shades of San Bruno,” shade-throwing supervisor Aaron Peskin told NBC Bay Area. “I think that San Francisco was very lucky that the fire didn’t go out of control.”

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