Last month’s Candlestick Park power outage was called a “national embarrassment” by Mayor Ed Lee, but now he’s using the incident to make his quippy prediction about Saturday’s much-anticipated playoff game: “I think the only ‘lights out’ at Candlestick this Saturday will be our 49ers shutting down the New Orleans Saints!”
Officials from The City and PG&E have assured the 49ers that the team shouldn’t expect a blackout like the one during the Dec. 19 edition of Monday Night Football, when the aging stadium went dark twice before a national audience.
Days later, San Francisco and the utility claimed joint responsibility for the outages due to a PG&E power line rupture and then a failed auxiliary switch inside the stadium, which is managed by The City and leased to the team.
Joe Molica, a spokesman for PG&E, said the utility has spent upward of $1 million on replacing about 1½ miles of new higher-capacity power lines from the circuit source near the Daly City line to the stadium. Molica said workers also ran power outage scenarios to make sure the lights would come back on in the event of any failure.
“Bottom line is, we’ll be ready,” Molica said.
dschreiber@sfexaminer.com
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