Power Restored To Final East Bay Customers

Jul. 19, 2007 (BCN) -- The final 1,000 PG&E customers across the East Bay that were without power Wednesday can turn their lights back on, spokeswoman Susan Simon said this morning.

The final group of customers that were without power was located in Berkeley and Richmond, Simon said. Power was fully restored to every customer around 1 a.m. this morning.

Traffic lights and business windows went dark beginning at around 6 a.m. after widespread outages in Richmond, Berkeley, El Cerrito and Albany, PG&E spokesman David Eisenhauer said.

Thanks to a strange combination of light rain falling on typically dusty summertime utility poles, a thin coat of electrically conductive mud developed on the poles and rapidly began blowing fuses, shorting out transformers and setting power poles ablaze across the East Bay.

"Such a thin film of mud does not typically have time to become conductive before simply washing away," Eisenhauer said.

However, Wednesday's rains - really no more than a drizzle at most times - were simply too light to wash the dust away, he said.

Crews were able to locate around 80 separate outages by around noon Wednesday, Eisenhauer said.

At one point as many as 17,000 customers were without power.

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