What Accountability Looks Like

On Dec. 20, 2025, a third of San Francisco went dark.

It started with a fire at a Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) substation near Eighth and Mission streets. What followed was not a minor inconvenience. It was food spoiling in refrigerators. It was medical equipment losing power. It was a 95-year-old constituent on a ventilator being rushed to the hospital at two in the morning. It was small businesses in the Sunset and Richmond districts having to throw away everything in their coolers during one of the busiest shopping weeks of the year.

Some residents were without power for three days.

Last week, I convened an oversight hearing to get answers. PG&E’s CEO came to City Hall. So did representatives from our Fire Department and the Department of Emergency Management. What we learned was troubling.

PG&E did not notify the Fire Department about the substation fire for more than an hour. They did not contact the Department of Emergency Management, the agency leading the City’s response, for two hours. When firefighters arrived at the substation, they had to learn the layout of the facility from paper diagrams handed to them by PG&E in real time.

The estimated restoration times sent to customers? Generated by software that didn’t work. Residents and business owners had no idea when power would return — and neither, it seemed, did PG&E.

There was no plan to ensure power was restored equitably. No clear communication. No coordination with the city agencies responsible for keeping people safe.

This is not acceptable.

Let me be clear about what accountability actually means. It does not mean a press release. It does not mean a website update. It does not mean bill credits that don’t come close to covering actual losses. And it does not mean an opaque claims process that is slow, confusing and difficult to navigate.

Accountability means answers. It means transparency. It means making sure this does not happen again. And it means taking responsibility to make affected residents whole.

The $200 credit for residential customers and $2,500 for businesses is a start — but for merchants who lost tens of thousands of dollars in spoiled inventory and missed revenue, it doesn’t come close. I’ve walked Irving Street with PG&E representatives and heard directly from shop owners about what they lost. Many of them are still waiting on claims.

This pattern cannot continue.

I vied for this office promising to fight for the Sunset. That means fighting for the seniors who sat in the dark for days. It means fighting for the small business owners who watched their inventory spoil. It means fighting for the families who scrambled to protect medically vulnerable loved ones.

PG&E has operated with too little oversight for too long. Our residents deserve a power system that works, one that is accountable to ratepayers, not shareholders.

This oversight process is not finished. I have required PG&E to return to the committee once its investigation is complete and to present a full public report on the root cause of the outage, findings of the investigation, responsibility determinations and a clear timeline for corrective actions. A follow-up hearing will examine how this failure occurred, whether deeper structural issues exist, whether maintenance and capital investments are adequate and what reforms are necessary to reduce future risk rather than reacting only after the next crisis.

I’m grateful to my colleagues – Supervisors Bilal Mahmood, Connie Chan, Stephen Sherrill, Myrna Melgar and Danny Sauter – who co-sponsored this hearing and share my commitment to holding PG&E accountable. This is not a partisan issue. This is about basic infrastructure, public safety and trust.

One third of this City lost power for days. That is not weathering a storm. That is being told to figure it out.

We deserve better. And I’m going to keep pushing until we get it.

Supervisor Alan Wong represents District 4 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Reach his office at wongstaff@sfgov.org or 415-554-7460.