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:

SF is a technology hub? It can't keep the power on in weather a Scots West Highlander would describe as "April, maybe early May as well."

- Iain Thomson (@iainthomson) December 11, 2014

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:

wow! SB 280 #DalyCity all lanes flooded. traffic getting by using shoulder! #bayareastorm #hellastorm pic.twitter.com/5Yfhy8ne7W

- Kristen Sze (@abc7kristensze) December 11, 2014

Meanwhile, this pic has totally gone viral:

@sfgate based on your #bayareastorm coverage aka #stormageddon im expecting tomorrow to look something liiiiike.... pic.twitter.com/RRRisFzhZk

- Ally (@AllyNgSF) December 11, 2014

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.

san francisco's inability to come up with a cohesive hashtag for this storm is the most surprising infrastructure failure of all

- Elaine Filadelfo (@urchkin) December 11, 2014