A power outage across the city of Berkeley Tuesday left thousands of residents without electricity and temporarily shut down BART service to the Downtown Berkeley station.
According to Jana Morris, a PG&E spokesperson, the outage occurred around 5:29 p.m. and initially affected 7,100 customers in the city.
Service to the Downtown Berkeley BART station resumed as of 6:50 p.m., and power was fully restored to residents as of 7:09 p.m., according to Morris.
Morris said the outage was caused by an underground equipment failure near the 1800 block of University Avenue.
PG&E spokesperson Tamar Sarkissian said Wednesday that the equipment failure caused smoke near 1811 University Avenue but there was no fire.
Joe Banuelos, owner of Berkeley Typewriter and Clark Business Machines on University Avenue, said he witnessed a pothole pop out of the street and was told by the Berkeley Fire Department not to go outside.
Manager of Fashion Nails on University Jennifer Deng said the shop experienced a light outage around 5:30 p.m., but it did not stop her business from operating.
Christopher Yee is an assistant news editor.
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PG&E seems to be incapable of keeping its power on consistently. I suspect the infrastructure has been allowed to decay, while the company thinks nothing of spending $40 million on sponsoring ballot initiatives designed to trick voters into making competition with PG&E illegal…
Third world problems.