Here's Where The Power Is Out In Downtown San Francisco
A once-in-a-decade sized storm hit San Francisco this morning, and has knocked out power to more than 80,000 people in the city.
A huge part of downtown San Francisco, including most of the financial district and the dozens of luxury shops around Union Square, were blacked out this morning. There were no traffic lights, so police were directing traffic. The underground subway station at Montgomery Street, in the heart of the Financial District, was shut down.
Here's a map from PG&E, the local utility, showing where electricity was down during the morning commute:
The right part of that red area includes most of downtown, including the Financial District. A lot of startups are located in that yellow swath, south of Market Street. Red means that single outage is affecting more than 5,000 people; yellow means a smaller outage affecting less than 500 people.The real map, which will be updated throughout the day, is here. It looks like they're quickly getting the worst outages fixed.
A lot of people who have dealt with much worse weather elsewhere are making fun of how soft Northern California is:
But the simple fact of the matter is that the Bay Area is not equipped for this kind of rain. The drainage systems aren't built for four inches of rain in a 24-hour period, and the gusts of wind, which were over 50 miles an hour this morning in some parts of the city, knocked over a lot of tree branches. A lot of roads look like this now:
Meanwhile, this pic has totally gone viral:
And we're all arguing over what to call this thing on Twitter. The hashtag #hellastorm seems to be winning - "hella" is Bay Area slang meaning "very." Nobody says it anywhere else.