Power outage in San Francisco

Wed Jan 22 20:44:42 UTC 1997

There is a power outage in San Francisco affecting a large area South
of Market Street, including China Basin.  The outage begain shortly
after 12:00am PST Wednesday and was caused by flooding of an
underground PG&E transformer.  Current estimated restoral of power by
PG&E is around 6:00pm Wednesday. (Prior estimates were for 12:00 noon).

Whole Earth Networks has was down all night.  We've been coming up
slowly as we pull in power feeds from mobile generators.  The China
Basin complex where we are located has been quite a scene, with cables
running out the to roof and down the side of the building to
generators running in the courtyard below.  There's been alot of
cooperation amoungst providers with Sprint and TCG sharing spare power
capacity on the generators and pulling wires to other providers in the
building.  MFS has also been helping their customers with power
restoral.  MCI has a big mobile generator in the courtyard as well.
The power for the emergency lighting in the complex (multiple 6 story
buildings) lasted only a few hours and we're all running around in the
halls with flashlights.

A big lesson to be learned by all.  Rumor has it that we now have
approval now for the purchase of our own generator.

Rob