Around 21,000 customers were without power in North Santa Clara County after a Pacific Gas and Electric substation in Saratoga caught fire and belched black smoke into the air on Christmas Eve.
PG&E learned about the emergency at its facility at 12975 Glen Brae Dr. at 8:25am, which it said was responsible for cutting power to 16,500 of those customers. The rest were likely storm-related, the company noted.
“We responded to reports of a fire,” said PG&E spokesperson Stephanie Magallon, adding the blaze went out by itself while crews were on site—adding the company was successful in getting electricity working again many affected residents quickly. “We’ve been able to restore the majority of those customers.”
She said, by around 11:30am, just 2,000 of these customers remained without power.
PG&E later said it was able to get power restored for the rest by noon.
The cause of the fire was an equipment failure, but other than that, it remains under investigation, Magallon said, adding that it’s too soon to say whether the San Francisco outage of last weekend (which was also related to PG&E substation infrastructure) or this smaller one were caused by the stormy weather.
Bill Sullivan is one of the Saratoga residents who lost power.
“Maybe the transformer got overloaded,” he speculated. “It’s traditional.”
At the time he was sitting at home looking at the PG&E outage map on his phone, curious about another electricity failure in the area.
“Then, I heard the boom and the power went out,” he said. “When you live near a substation like this, you get used to it.”
He opted to travel by bike to a neighboring city to run an errand.
“I rode to Cupertino to buy groceries,” he said, noting this took him about 20 minutes.
His power had already been restored by 11:30am, he said.
By 12:40pm, there were still around 2,700 PG&E customers without power, the company reported.
That included 750 in Sunnyvale, 280 in Saratoga, 1,200 in Los Gatos and 155 in Cupertino.
*Updated to clarify the subset of customers affected by the substation fire
