We knew that bag of 100 IKEA tea lights would come in handy one of these days! Yet another fire at that same PG&E substation that keeps bursting into flames blacked out 22,000 customers in San Francisco on Saturday night. You may remember this substation as the same one that caught on fire on the last shopping day before Christmas in 2003, was left to burn for 2 hours as PG&E went into denial about the whole thing, caused a huge blackout throughout the city for over 24 hours, and was blamed for single-handedly ruining merchants' sales for the entire year (at a cost of $4 million)?

PG&E claims they've learned from the past and called this one in as soon as the smoke alarm went off. (Can't slip anything by those folks.) However, the SF Fire Department is annoyed that PG&E told them it was okay to fight the fire with water, claiming that the fire was not water-safe, the water caused a huge explosion and increased the scope of the power outage, and fire fighters might well have been killed. PG&E, after first saying that this sort of thing should be expected when you're fighting fires in the first place, is now claiming no explosion actually happened. Hm.

Any good blackout stories? We can report that we were in the Haight, where we didn't notice a single thing out of the ordinary because Amoeba Records was lit up like Vegas. Does Amoeba have its own generator or something?

Picture of PG&E substation from ABC 7