Power loss kills BART for 6 hours Substation outages knock out service, snarl freeways, bridges all day

Tyche Hendricks, Elizabeth Bell, Chronicle staff writers Sunday, August 12, 2001 ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/08/12/MN185574.DTL

A pair of predawn power outages shut down BART's transbay service for six hours yesterday, stranding thousands of riders and creating a traffic snarl that clogged bridges and freeways and illustrated the fragility of the Bay Area's transportation system as the threat of a BART strike looms.

As a result of the shutdown -- the worst in almost three years -- many riders took to the freeways, in their cars and aboard crowded buses, while others just fumed at the delay and lack of warning and information from BART.

The crush of westbound traffic on the Bay Bridge backed up at times to Richmond on Interstate 80 and the Caldecott Tunnel on Highway 24, lasting for hours after transbay service was restored.

The shutdown came on an event-filled day around the Bay Area, including an A's game at the Oakland Coliseum and an Eric Clapton concert next door, dragon boat races at Jack London Square, a Filipino festival in downtown San Francisco and the Festival of India in Fremont.

Yesterday's chaos could be an unexpected preview of things to come if BART unions vote to strike next month. The two largest unions are currently under a state-imposed cooling off period that ends Sept. 4. The last strike was in 1997 and lasted six days.

Although some riders thought yesterday's problem stemmed from a labor dispute, it was entirely electrical in nature.

Two of BART's substations, at Powell Street and the Embarcadero in San Francisco, shut down about 5:45 a.m. yesterday, knocking out train service between Civic Center and West Oakland stations, according to BART spokesman Mike Healy. The substations provide power to the third rail in downtown San Francisco and through the Transbay Tube, he said.

The cause of the outage is under investigation, Healy said.

Until service was restored at noon, a bus "bridge" shuttled passengers between the West Oakland BART station and the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco. Although 40 buses were called into service from AC Transit, SamTrans, Golden Gate Transit and a private tour bus company, the result was a mess for travelers.

Many early-morning riders bound for San Francisco stepped off BART at West Oakland into confusion. There weren't nearly enough buses to shuttle passengers across the bay, said AC Transit Supervisor Gary Grant, and one BART police officer was trying to manage hundreds of frustrated riders -- some pushing and shoving to get on buses in the absence of an organized line.

Some riders complained that they had been waiting for a long time while others had quickly pushed their way onto a bus. At the worst point, people were waiting 1 1/2 hours to catch a bus, said Grant.

"On the weekend our staff is a little bit shorter, so we got caught a little bit off guard," said Grant. Some drivers agreed to work overtime. Two buses were pulled from their regular routes, but AC Transit said they caused minimal delays for East Bay riders.

By late morning, officers from AC Transit and the Alameda County Sheriff's Department had organized the crowd, using yellow police tape, into a long line that encircled the base of the BART station. The line was moving fairly smoothly as passengers were loaded onto buses, which departed as soon as they were full.

James Ratliff, 55, was already more than an hour late getting to his tailoring shop on Sutter Street, where he had several appointments for fittings. He was worried about standing up his customers.

"I've been waiting here for 45 minutes. At each BART station, they could have let you know there was no Transbay service," said Ratliff, who boarded in Fremont and didn't know about the service disruption until he was already on his train.

In San Francisco, Lisa Ornelas and Aaron Parrish climbed on a bus at the Transbay Terminal at 11 a.m. to make their way home to Walnut Creek. Because BART service stops shortly after midnight, the couple had slept at a cousin's house in the city after spending a Friday night on the town.

"I have to be back in San Francisco to go to work in two hours," groaned Ornelas, who sells makeup at Macy's. "If I had known this would happen, I would have brought a change of clothes."

"It's just a hassle," said Parrish. "It's a big inconvenience."

CARRYING HEAVY LOAD For Peter Chang, 31, the hassle was possibly worse. The computer programmer was traveling from Palo Alto to Oakland by bicycle and public transit to pick up another bike frame.

Like hundreds of his fellow travelers, he had to get off BART at Civic Center, take a Muni bus to the Transbay Terminal, ride an AC Transit bus to West Oakland and get back on BART to reach his destination near Lake Merritt. On the return trip, he would be carrying not only his own bike but the second bicycle frame as well.

"I'm trying not to be bothered by it," he said.

AC Transit estimated that 5,000 passengers made use of the bus bridge, said Healy, who had to forfeit his plans to race dragon boats on the Oakland estuary because of the crisis. Between 6 a.m. and noon on a typical Saturday, roughly 23,000 people ride BART systemwide, he said. Saturday ridership overall averages 120,000 to 130,000.

BART has a mutual aid agreement with the region's bus services to deal with such emergencies, Healy said. The cost will run to the thousands of dollars, he said.

COMMUTERS TAKE TO THEIR CARS Once word spread of the BART outage, many people took to their cars to get across the bay. Although Caltrans did not have a count of automobiles yesterday afternoon, commuters reported that their usually breezy bridge crossing took as much as 1 1/2 hours.

"It backed up early. It looked like a normal weekday commute. On a Saturday morning, it doesn't back up that early," said Bay Bridge Toll Plaza Lt. Sharon Wacker. "The backup went all the way through the maze and up the ramps."

In fact, Saturday is actually the busiest day on the Bay Bridge, said Caltrans spokesman Colin Jones, so a BART problem could really jam up the bridge. Although Saturday traffic is more evenly spread over the day than the weekday commute, the Bay Bridge usually carries 150,000 westbound vehicles -- compared with 140,000 on weekdays.

Throughout the afternoon, officials said, traffic heading for the bridge was heavy all the way up Interstate 80 to Richmond and on Highway 24 back to the Caldecott Tunnel.

On the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, traffic was congested for three to four hours yesterday morning, whereas on most Saturdays, it's not congested for more than an hour all day, said toll Sgt. Jose Romero. Traffic was also heavier than usual on the San Mateo and Dumbarton bridges, although toll officials could not say if it was because of BART.

LITTLE WARNING OF INTERRUPTION Many BART riders expressed frustration that signs warning of the service problem were not posted on ticket machines. They only learned of the disruption after entering the BART system. Healy said BART officials were making announcements over the public address system in all the stations.

Rider Sean Seward said the announcement he heard in the Civic Center BART station warned passengers not to try to board a bus at the Transbay Terminal because the lines were too long. But no alternative options were suggested, he said.

"My two-hour commute has turned into a three- or four-hour commute," said Seward, who was bound for Berkeley and found the bus line not as bad as he had feared.

French tourists Roger Dournaux and Marie Remont said that, even without the power outage, they found riding public transit confusing in the Bay Area.

"We were just in New York, and their subway is much easier," said Dournaux. "There are too many different transit companies here."

"BART is too complicated, and it's too expensive," said Remont. "In Paris, the Metro is dirty and dangerous, but it's fast and easy to use."

Although some riders were boiling with frustration at the delays and inconvenience, many others tried to keep a positive attitude.

"This is actually good for me, because I'm going to do something I don't really want to do, and now I have an excuse for being late," said San Francisco resident Connie Johnson, 31, as she boarded a bus at the Transbay Terminal. "I have to baby-sit for a little kid who's a monster."

NO BACKUP TO RUN TRAINS Although BART has backup power sources for its stations, there is no backup system to run the trains themselves, said Healy.

"It's very, very rare for two substations to go down like this," he said. "If it had been just one of the stations, we might have been OK."

The worst problem ever on the BART system occurred in January 1979, when a fire broke out on a train going through the Transbay tube during the evening commute. One firefighter died, and the tube was closed for two months.

The tube was also closed in December 1998 when a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. power failure shut down the entire system from 8:15 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. In December 1996, the tube was closed from 6:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. when a cable that powers the system's third rail shorted out.

"It's a mess, but I'm not mad," said one rider, who left Fremont at dawn to go shopping in San Francisco. "I'm just hoping there's not going to be a BART strike."

E-mail the writers at thendricks@sfchronicle.com and ebell@sfchronicle.com.

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 12, 2001