Power outages hit Berkeley on Tuesday night. Image: PG&E

More than 6,000 PG&E customers in Berkeley lost power Tuesday night, according to community reports and the utility’s outage map online.

Berkeleyside began getting outage reports on Twitter just before 9:50 p.m. Some local residents said their power came back quickly, while others said they were still without electricity as of more than an hour later.

Local reporter Kate Wolffe was at the scene. She said on Twitter that the fire department told her there may have been an explosion in an underground vault near Hearst and McGee avenues.

According to PG&E’s outage map, power might not return until 1 a.m. Wednesday and a “PG&E assessment crew is en route to the outage.”

The PG&E website initially said there were eight outages in Berkeley affecting nearly 6,200 customers. As of about 11 p.m., the website listed 12 outages affecting more than 5,400 customers.

Local residents on Twitter tried to stay optimistic.

Sara Brooke Allan shared a video of the outage in her area.

The outage took down the Granicus video feed of Tuesday night’s Berkeley City Council meeting and temporarily kicked two council members off the meeting Zoom broadcast. Both were able to rejoin after a brief delay, though one said she had to use a generator to do so.

One community member noted on Twitter that the burden placed on people by power outages has become more intense amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Berkeleyside will update this story if additional information becomes available.

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Emilie Raguso (former senior editor, news) joined Berkeleyside in 2012 and covered politics, public safety and development until her departure in 2022. In 2017, Emilie was named Journalist...