PG&E, Now In Full Crisis Mode, Offering $200 Credits to SF Residents, $2500 to Businesses for Weekend Outage

Utility provider PG&E is hoping you’ll forget about this weekend’s one- to three-day power outage with a $200 credit for residential customers and a $2,500 credit for businesses, though some businesses say they lost ten times that much.

The finger-pointing and blame games continue over PG&E’s massive power outage that left more than 200,000 San Franciscans without electricity this weekend, as well they should. How did PG&E allow a smaller outage to grow so large, and why were their timeline updates on power being restored so completely inaccurate? Why did the entire citywide fleet of Waymos become inoperable?

And Mayor Daniel Lurie is trying to portray himself as Mister Savior here, but I was downtown on about Hour Six of this blackout Saturday, and there were no personnel directing traffic at intersections that had been without stop lights for hours. Why was the city’s response so flat-footed?  

Lurie was once again selling himself as having been all over this thing in his Tuesday morning video update seen above, announcing that power had finally been restored to all SF PG&E customers. And NBC Bay Area picks up on the announcement Lurie references above, that PG&E customers will get a $200 credit for the outage, while affected businesses will get a $2,500 credit.

Though Saturday and Sunday’s outages likely, collectively cost SF businesses somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars, coming on one of the busiest shopping days of the year on the weekend before Christmas.

In true PG&E fashion, their announcement video above trots out some mid-level manager so the higher-ups can avoid accountability. But some higher-ups did show up and face the music. “We understand how frustrating and confusing this was,” PG&E chief operating officer Sumeet Singh told reporters Monday at a press conference, according to the Chronicle. “We are committed to understanding exactly what happened, why it happened, and owning the fixes.”

A $2,500 credit for affected small businesses may sound nice at first. But some local small businesses say they lost ten to twenty times that much money on the blackouts, because of the unfortunate timing on the Saturday before Christmas, which was also the weekend of the Chinese celebration of the winter solstice. Irving Street’s Lam Hoa Thuan restaurant tells KGO they lost about $40,000 – $60,000 worth of inventory over the mess.

PG&E posted an announcement on their website of how the refund credit works. “Residential customers will automatically receive a $200 bill credit, and business customers will receive an approximately $2,500 credit,” PG&E says in their announcement. “Customers don’t need to file a claim or take any action; credits will appear on bills as ‘Customer Satisfaction Adjustment.’”

In other words, the credit will just show up on some future bill, and you don’t need to do anything. But what if you or your business endured a hell of a lot more hardship than $2,500 worth?

Of course, PG&E does not include this link in any of their announcements. But there is a page where you can file a claim for losses related to the December 20 power outage. And it may be an ongoing story for the foreseeable future whether businesses are getting their claims honored, or whether PG&E is just “going dark” on these reimbursement requests.

Related: PG&E Blames ‘Catastrophic Incident’ For Outage as Over 10,000 Remain Without Power, Muni Still Disrupted [SFist]

Image: SAN FRANCISCO, CA – APRIL 21: A pedestrian looks at a sign posted on the door of a hardware store during a citywide power outage on April 21, 2017 in San Francisco, California. Nearly 100,000 Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) customers in San Francisco are without power that could be related to a fire at a PG&E substation. Street lights and public transportation that is powered by electricity are also out of service. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)