Massive Power Outage hit Berkeley, Albany, and Beyond

BERKELEY, CA - It took close to four hours, but PG&E has finally restored power to Berkeley, Albany, Kensington, El Cerrito, Richmond and San Pablo.

The cause of the outage has been traced to a transformer fire in El Cerrito. Bay City News reports that the fire started when cables failed inside a new 115,000-volt transformer installed over the weekend. The 1-inch diameter cables made a loud sound as they failed, prompting some callers to report there had been an explosion, El Cerrito Fire Battalion Chief Michael Pigoni said. The failure set about 20 hay bales on fire, which had been set around the transformer as it was installed just in case there was a coolant leak. Firefighters were at the substation for about two-and-a-half hours, first waiting for the transformer to power down, then taking the hay bales apart to get the fire out.

At its height, more than 40,000 customers were affected by the outage.

The Downtown Berkeley BART station was closed fortwo hours as a result of the power failure.