A power outage affected more than 1,800 households in Palo Alto on July 4, according to Palo Alto Utilities.
The department announced the outage at about 8:15 a.m. Some residents, however, reported on Town Square, the online community forum, that the power failure occurred between 5 and 6 a.m.
The blackout initially affected the areas between Middlefield Road and Alma Street and between Embarcadero Road and El Carmelo Avenue.
Traffic signals also went out, according to the utilities department.
Following the initial power failure, additional outages occurred, extending north to Palo Alto Avenue and south to San Antonio Road.
Separate outages also involved areas near Black Mountain Open Space Preserve to Highway 35.
Power was restored to all customers by 11:10 a.m., officials said. They attributed the failure to a burning branch.
In total, 1,836 customers were affected, according to the city map.
A map of outages the city updates every five minutes can be found at here.
To report an outage customers, can call 650-496-6914.
The outage actually began shortly after 6 AM.
Joanie’s Cafe had extra breakfast customers this morning.
“Lasted until 10:00 A.M.?”
It’s 10:10 AM and there is still no power.
I lived in Palo Alto on Alma near East Meadow from 2000 – 2006 and was surprised at the frequent black outs in that area. I wonder why the problem has not yet been corrected.
I’ve lived in downtown Menlo Park for the last eight years and have experienced maybe one black out.
The map shows that there are some boy now 5 customers without electricity now. Is old Palo Alto affected also?
Had anyone tried calling Palo Alto Utility’s outage hotline? It is the worst automated system that I have ever used.
I live in Southgate and the power has been out since 5:30 a.m. Does anyone know what caused the outage or when power might be restored?
Yes, we are affected too. At least we and our neighbors are affected.
Hmmm. Now the map shows a wide area without power. Not very reliable. And what is with the weekly reporting that power has been restored?
The power outage started before 6AM… and lasted until about 10… then went out again at 10:20. This is really getting annoying.
Still without power at midtown near alma.
PA Utilities appears to have wired Palo Alto in a crazy-quilt manner. One block will lose power but a house two doors down on another block has power. Some traffic lights on Middlefield in Midtown are out, but some are on. I remember once that a tree falling on a power line in Barron Park caused a power failure on Emerson Street and North California. Is this the way utility companies normally wire up a city?
It is 11:05 and Old Palo Alto still has no power. We hooked up our fridge and coffeemaker to our generator!
Power went out here at 5:00 this morning!
Our electricity finally came back on at around 11am after being off since around 5:45am. From the looks of it, we were all “in the dark” about what caused this and when it would be resolved. 😉
Good news the power went on”
Bad news the lights at Churchill Ave. and Alma aren’t working. Be careful Caltrain is adding more trains for the holiday.h
Well… Palo Alto Utilities announced that power was restored. The case… a tree branch. It amazes me with the technology we have at our finger tips that it took 5 hours to find the problem. (Most likely done the old fashioned way… drive around and look for it.)
@ George – I doubt it took 5 hours to find the problem, it probably took 5 hours to rewire and test the line, then bring power up across 75% of the city.
Power outages are very common in the rest of the world. What if there is a real disaster? It sounds like people are not prepared for instances like this.
There has been a lot of city trucks digging in the streets to lay in new cable. Is this power outage actually a result of the city digging in the streets? The city needs to lay out what the plan is for all of the cable activity in the streets – what they are trying to accomplish and what is the schedule for this activity.
There are major projects that go on is the city which have no public discussion as to project goal, project schedule, and project cost.
Similar complaint as to extensive activity at the East Embarcadero / Bayshore intersection – lot of construction and digging which is close to the main power lines. That whole are is under siege with huge trucks hauling dirt and then going up Oregon Expressway to get more dirt. We just refinished that street and huge dirt haulers are on it all day. Is this what was planned for this main commuter street that is under discussion all of the time? Is there going to be a round-a bout for dirt hauling trucks?
One end of the city does not know what the other end of the city is doing. We are only twenty-six square miles – why is that so hard?
This is how this works:
Palo Alto Utility workers are on call. Most cannot afford to live in the area.They get the call,they have to drive up from San Jose or further, usually it takes two guys.They find the problem, for example transformer, downed line ect… Get gear go fix it. Remember, it is the fourth of July. I think they did a pretty damn good job.
P.S. Some of you folks do not have clue how challenging the job can be.
@resident 1:
“There has been a lot of city trucks digging in the streets to lay in new cable. Is this power outage actually a result of the city digging in the streets?”
No, as stated earlier above your post, the outage was caused by a tree branch.
No one is digging on Independence Day.
Hey, neighbor, I’m going to agree with you. For COPA, such a problem is exceedingly challenging. So…why not allow the choice of PG & E?
Folk need to understand;
A modern Electric grid is not simple.
It is a Grid in many places (think chicken wire as the paths). Power can flow from multiple directions.
The there are MANY single/dead end branches (like short streets) off of that. Inside your house is ONLY single branch circuits.
A fault will trip ALL the breakers that feed that part of the grid.
Add into this. Some wires are underground, some on poles in the REAR (property line).
Oh! most of the Grid is Very high voltages, not the 120/240 found in your house. Those voltages can punch through a tiny hole in weak insulation. Special tools and equipment are needed just to reset a tripped breaker. This is a very hazardous job. Please Be kind to the CPAU workers who are using extreme care when working on power lines.
REMEMBER Never get near down or damaged power lines. the ARC can jump inches
So is it wise for Palo Alto to eliminate natural gas service?
Just thinking about hot-water heater or warming some grub on the stove.
Imagine if we lost water and telecom with electricity outages.
Resident 1– maybe it was a low flying airplane clipped an electrical wire
I am grateful for the speed with which we were reconnected to the grid. This is a service I take for granted but is lacking many places.
What if there had been a natural disaster or other emergency effecting water, gas, and more? This morning was a wake up call for me. Not knowing what had happened (though I did hear a low boom just before the outage), I began looking for the emergency radio, extra batteries, city emergency numbers and my FRS radio which all BPC- Block Preparedness Coordinators own. As I ate a cold breakfast in the yard, I felt very unprepared for “the big one”.
How did you feel? If you felt as I did, go to http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/services/public_safety/office_of_emergency_services/ to learn what to put together for emergency resources, how to become a Block Preparedness Coordinator and more.
https://paloaltocana.samariteam.com/ to learn about the Block Preparedness Program
Seems reasonable to make comparison with other AMERICAN electrical service providers. Worldwide electric availability is an entirely different subject. I advent been on PG&E for years but am interested generally to hear about current nearby rates and service from them.
PGE charges higher rates for both electric and gas. My parent’s PGE is always higher than our CPAU bill…which also includes sewer, water, trash, tax. No comparison.
Whatever happened to the city’s plan to underground power lines citywide?
About 15 or 20 years ago, I remember having to pay about $10,000 to have the power lines on my property (back and front) undergrounded. I also used to joke that the back yard wires were the New Jersey Turnpike for squirrels to get onto and into our tile roof.
> PGE charges higher rates for both electric and gas.
PAU natural gas rates have been higher than PG&E in recent years. The reason is that because Palo Alto’s gas use is very low, compared to PG&E’s customer base–no one wants to sell to Palo Alto for the short 2-year contracts that the PAU has been seeking. PG&E charges are based on the spot market; whereas, the PAU has a weird notion of trying to level charges by not linking its rates to spot market purchases.
That said–the future can bring changes that will see the PAU using different purchasing strategies. Energy costs can only go up. Palo Alto has a very small customer base to spread the cost increases across, unlike PG&E.
> My parent’s PGE is always higher than our CPAU bill…
> which also includes sewer, water, trash, tax. No comparison.
Trying to compare two utility bills for two different houses, two different sets of occupants, and two different vendors is not impossible–but requires a bit of work.
Without knowing the actual energy consumption for each dwelling, the impact of the tiered rate structure, and the cost of energy in each tiering–just comparing the bottom line for each bill will yield a result that is non-comparable.
The utility workers DID have to drive around in trucks looking for the problem. At 8:45 yesterday morning, my husband stopped a utility dept truck to ask how the fix was going. The gentleman answered that once they found it, it would be fixed quickly, but they couldn’t DNS the problem.
When we left home to get breakfast in Menlo Park, we literally saw utility workers looking up at the tops of poles with binoculars!
Power did come back on for me around 10:10 am and then dropped out again 10-15 minutes later for another half hour, or maybe a bit more.
I would like to read a one or two paragraph summary from CPAU of the outage and the response and the process of bringing the grid back up. 5-6 hours is a long time to not have power over about half the city without there being a major storm event creating multiple problems. I want to understand.
@David
It sounds like a tree branch fell on a line and it was hard to locate.Possibly it was in a backyard and the resident was out of town. After all it is the fourth of July weekend.
here is my concern regarding power failure.
On Wednesday I got U-verse- not because I really wanted it, but because they wouldn’t give me a decent rate otherwise. In U-verse they run the phone lines through a modem which has a battery back-up just for keeping the phone lines up for a while during power failures.I don’t own a cell phone and quickly realized that if the power failed for the 10 hours which was the duration of our total city black-out a few years ago I would not have emergency phone capability. Pleaded with ATT to get my phone back to POTS, but it takes a few days, so the 5 hour power outage on July 4th still had me with the phone line going through the modem. Tested for dial tone 2 hours into the outage and still had it; then left my home and returned just after power had been restored. Don’t know if the modem battery lasted the whole 5 hours of the outage, but it took at least 3 hours for the battery to recharge. Don’t think that a Comcast box would do any better. So for the few of you who depend on a working phone line, consider that the old style phone landline runs on power which comes from other sources than Palo Alto Utilities and it adds some safety in case of emergency.
So we know this was caused by a burning tree branch, but do we know what caused the branch to be on fire? My guess is fireworks.
So many of our power outages are caused by reasons that would not have occurred if the power lines were underground.
The cost of putting this to rights is only part of the costs. The costs to businesses and residents for not having power are probably incalculable but high. If this had occurred on a weekday, the commute plus business life would have been devastating. If it were a school day, staff and students would have been delayed by the traffic mess this would have meant.
It is incredible that this center of innovation has such third world infrastructure.
Get those power lines underground.
Resident
You sure like spending OPM
An underground High Voltage line is very difficult to repair.
This WAS a High Voltage issue as it took out more than a few houses.
Unfortunately, even with USA markings, contractors still dig into utilities.
Believe me. Clearing a branch or stringing a overhead wire is a lot quicker than replacing a HV feeder
Spending Other People’s Money??
Hardly. I certainly remember being forced to spend around $10,000 of MY Own Money when Palo Alto forced property owners to pay for the undergrounding of the power lines to our properties. I don’t remember exactly when that was but it was between 15 and 25 years ago. Anyone remember?
When people objected to coming up with that amount all at once, the city belatedly devised an installment plan but it took them forever to respond to complaints and by then most of the people had already paid for it.
So I repeat my question: Whatever happened to the undergrounding project for the rest of the city?
@Resident – You’re saying that fireworks caused the tree to burn and the branch to fall on the wire that caused the outage? The outage occurred at 5:30 AM the morning of July 4th. So, unless someone got up REALLY early to shoot off fireworks, I doubt it was fireworks.
Would love to see how long it would take crews to find the problem and fix it on an underground line.
It was 5 hours without power. If that is a hardship for you, you should probably get a backup generator installed.
If the city ground to a halt for a day, I think the world would survive.
Third world infrastructure? Try going to a third world country.
The city can not manage any large scale projects. Look at their recent handling of the Mitchell Park Library, El Camino Park, PA Golf Course, etc… Their last big public works project was the storm drains about 15 years back. Residents voted to add an increase for that project, remember? Two years in to a 7 year project they ran out of money.
I wouldn’t trust them with moving the power underground. Although we do have it here in Southgate and it’s awesome to not have wires all over the place…
SHAME ON SF AND SHAME ON THE MEDIA AND SHAME ON ALL THE POLITICAL AGITATORS–
where is the outrage for the young lady that was shot and killed by an illegal alien that had been deported 5 times already prior to this event last week. walking on a popular tourist site–enjoying the day with her father.
where is the media on provoking outrage? where is Al Sharpton? where is Reverand Jackson? where is the mayor? (Baltimore’s mayor certainly did her share of provoking outrage during their event.) where is the President with his chirping in on such events?
SILENT!!
SHAME ON EVERYONE who isn’t outraged and protesting in the streets.
“If the city ground to a halt for a day, I think the world would survive.”
That was proven in February 2010, when a showoff pilot from the local airport took out our power feed and shut down the whole town for the day. The world indeed went on. It did, however, cost local businesses a large chunk of change.
Xcel Energy ( which it isn’t )covers most of the country in the USA. They IMMEDIATELY FIRE the electrical workers when they acquire another company and the service you had goes way down in quality. Everybody that is under their “ rule “ start wishing for the days when service was of a better quality and cost less. We had an outage that lasted FIVE DAYS IN THE RECORD BREAKING COLD SPELL in Colorado. My backup generator could not even handle the heat tapes I had from WI and the hydronic heat pipes froze and split. You guys are lucky. Just turn an outage into a picnic.
Losing power for a day isn’t really a big deal in the grand scheme of things unless you’re an ice cream shop and you lose all your inventory.
The typical local business should be able to handle the odd power outage. Let’s say you’re open 360 days a year and you’re unexpectedly closed for a day. That one day roughly equals 0.28% of annual revenue. A more damaging scenario would be a fire that closes the place down for months; hopefully the owner has business interruption insurance.
For a local business, a day-long power outage would mostly be just an annoying inconvenience, not a hardship or a financially ruinous situation.
But even an ice cream shop owner would need to consider the possibility of an all-day power outage or some other calamity voiding inventory. That’s what business interruption insurance is for.
Losing power for a full day can be a very big deal. You might have planned a meeting where you lose business or a big party where the food spoils or you miss your flight because your alarm didn’t go off. Endless possibilities.
Does the city ever issue refunds for outages??
> For a local business, a day-long power outage would mostly be just
> an annoying inconvenience,
What planet are you living on? Businesses that are well run have plans, and their revenue projections are based on their operating every day they are open for businesses. While it’s unlikely that every business that experiences a power outage will also have to deliver work via some contractual obligation–but it could happen, and the penalties for failure to deliver could be in the thousands of dollars, or even possibly more.
Businesses that are food-oriented are not going to be able to service customer demand, and staff that depends of tips as a part of their income are also out a days tips.
Ice cream shops (and there aren’t that many in Palo Alto) are not the only victims of a day-long power outage. If all the costs for that one day outage were tallied, it’s hard to believe that the nonimal cost was somewhere between $70M and $100M dollars.
A couple supermarkets did have the foresight to have a mobile generator at their disposal–which they brought to Palo Alto and powered their stores.
To make matters worse, the Utility refused to pay damages to any/all claimants for this particular outage.
Actually, businesses that are well run and have a strong connection to reality also accept that there are circumstances and situations beyond their control that may affect the possibility of normal business. Every single publicly traded company puts that boilerplate text in their SEC filings.
Like I said, business interruption insurance exists for a reason and if you open 360 days a year and you lose a day, that’s an average 0.27% of lost annual revenue lost from unexpected closure. If that’s too much for you to handle, make sure your business interruption insurance premiums are paid up and then file your claim.
“Show Off Pilot” is a little harsh don’t you think? The pilot and his passengers all died. Poor judgment does not necessarily make a show off.
There’s a lot more businesses in Palo Alto than retail, but retail of course would be hit. The bigger the store, think big box, the more business as well as food spoilage would be lost.
When we lost power for the full day, the school classrooms were too dark for the students to see the teacher and the teacher to see the students. Many classrooms were unusable and students were dismissed as a result.
How many offices would be dark and work would be impossible. In summer, think of the heat without air conditioning in these large offices, would they have to send their employees home if it was too hot? Remember how the libraries closed on hot days because there was no air conditioning. That would happen again.
Many businesses are run in homes or garages. They presumably would need to move to a library, if of course the library has power. Then there are service businesses, hair salons, dentists, car shops, etc.
Yes, the full cost of losing power could be colossal. Insurance is not going to cover all the inconvenience. If it had happened on AP Class exams, for instance, the cost there could be in non-monetary terms.
The delays arising out of traffic light failure, could cause big problems for Silicon Valley business as well as personal lives. Missing an interview, an exam, a flight, are all possibilities.
I am no expert on the different types of power lines, but undergrounding the rest of the City is a must. For those who have already got their powerlines underground, they could still be affected and for those of us who haven’t, the possibility of losing power is more than just an inconvenience. A reliable power supply is something that we do need.
Underground utilities have pros and cons. On the pro side they are more resistant to outages from wind, falling branches and errant vehicles. On the con side, underground utilities are subject to water damage and it can take much longer to locate and identify a fault and it is much more expensive to make underground repairs. I remember a case in SF where an underground transformer blew up (blowing manhole covers into the air) and it was at least a day before the smoke and fumes were cleared out to the point where workers could enter the vault. Underground electric lines would probably have fewer failures but those failures would last longer and be more expensive to fix. How many power failures have we had here and for how long? Would fewer but longer failures be worth the cost? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that it is NO.
Resident
Businesses that absolutely depend on power (like Facebooks server farms), have Standby generators.
Supermarkets in rural places (and some cities) have Generators that can sequence switched to refrigeration (Keeps it cold enough, Avoids having a huge unit capable of running all at once.
I grew up back east. We had a small generator that could run the Oil Burner (Heat) or the Water Pump. We cooked on a camp stove in those cases)
These are some of the similar things, we all should be doing to be ready for the ‘big one’, what happened back east (huge storms) is a heads up. Be Prepared. Don’t count on rapid repair in a widespread disaster (Loma Prieta?)
‘”Show Off Pilot” is a little harsh don’t you think? The pilot and his passengers all died. Poor judgment does not necessarily make a show off.’
Reality can be harsh. If the pilot had turned right to follow his assigned departure path in the heavy fog, instead of turning left onto a low altitude course headed directly over a passenger’s house, the crash into the powerlines would not have happened and the plane’s occupants would not have been killed.
And PA would not have lost power for the whole day.
> Every single publicly traded company puts
> that boilerplate text in their SEC filings.
This is Palo Alto—not NYC!
Most businesses in Palo Alto are small to medium sized, and not publicly owned. Given the number of small businesses that fail in Palo Alto, it’s hard to believe that many of these companies have business plans that include business closures attributed to “acts of God”, or airplane accidents from small planes that take out the power for the whole town.
It’s absurd to suggest that this power outage did no harm to Palo Alto/EPA businesses—particularly since there are arguably thousands of home-based/self-employed people living/working in Palo Alto who lost a day’s work. You are free to mock their losses—but I rather doubt that any business owner would agree with you and your irresponsible claims.
When the aggregate costs of this “accident” are considered—it’s hard not to see $70M to $100M in lost productivity, as well as revenue, for the whole town!
Information on undergrounding power lines is posted online at http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/gov/depts/utl/projects/faq/electric.asp
Unlike cable TV if there is a power outage, you don’t have to pay for the service you didn’t get to use.
Do we really expect a City Department to pay damages to residents and businesses for power outages caused from storms, car accidents, mylar balloons, rodents, burning trees? All of our rates would soar!
Back up generators are the solution for anyone who can’t tolerate business impacts of an occasional power outage.
As of 11 pm on July 4, the 800 block of High Street is blacked out by a new power failure–still going on now
Outage map weblink in this 2015 story is expired. New one is https://utccoutage.cityofpaloalto.org/mapviewer/mapviewer.html?config=Outage+Web+Map
Looks pretty ugly for downtown Palo Alto right now, just after midnite.
I dashed downtown to check it out. University Avenue was fine. South of Homer or Channing was dark, including all the traffic signals on Embarcadero from Waverley to El Camino. No drivers treated them as 4-way stops because the situation was practically invisible. The Embarcadero/ECR intersection was particularly exciting. All the lights suddenly came on again at 12:38 am.
New PA Online story at https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2017/07/04/power-outage-puts-more-than-2k-customers-in-the-dark for today’s outage. Coincidence that both are dated Fourth of July?