Lights are back on in San Francisco
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During the outage, diners were served by candlelight at Original Joes on Taylor Street in San Francisco.
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SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN) -- Repair crews late Sunday fully restored power to about 120,000 customers who lost electricity about 30 hours earlier, following a pair of substation fires, a power company spokesman said.
According to Jonathan Franks with Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the final customers were brought online at 11:55 p.m. (2:55 a.m. ET Monday).
The blackout began Saturday about 6 p.m. (9 p.m. ET) with the first substation fire, plunging thousands into darkness.
Roughly three hours later, with the fire extinguished, about half the mostly residential customers again had power.
But when a second fire broke out around midnight, many of those same customers were once again cast into darkness for another two hours.
"Fortunately for us, such a disaster occurred on a Saturday night, when most businesses had already shut down and were closed," said San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
"Huge areas of town were completely blacked out," Police Department Capt. Richard Corriea said Saturday night. The power outage, which affected all major thoroughfares, turned intersections into four-way stops, snarling traffic in many areas of the city.
Areas darkened included North Beach, Sunset, Mission, Chinatown, Richmond and downtown.
Brown said residents behaved despite the blackout.
"There was no loss of life, to the extent that we could tell, the incidents involving crime and activities on the streets were no greater than they normally are on any given Saturday night," he said.
"Most public facilities, like the transit system, had its own backup generating top capacity, as well as the hospitals, and the rest homes, and they didn't suffer any inconveniences."
Corriea said the fires were apparently were caused by a mechanical problem. There was no sign of vandalism, he said.
Franks said the company did not know how the fires started.
"That will be thoroughly investigated and a complete report will come of it," he said.
CNN Radio's Brooke Binkowski contributed to this story.
