Did You Lose Power Saturday?

More than 6,100 PG&E customers lost power in the East Bay on Saturday due to an outage that started in the early afternoon, a PG&E spokeswoman said.

The outage was reported at about 12:35 p.m. and initially affected 6,156 customers in parts of Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito and Richmond, PG&E spokeswoman Jana Morris said.

Power to all but 400 of those residents was restored by about 4:40 p.m., Morris said. And the situation was completely resolved by 7:20 p.m.

"It appears a piece of equipment failed, and it took time to get repairs completed," she said.

She said the equipment failure caused power lines to fall down onto the road in an undisclosed Bay Area location.

No injuries were reported.

According to the Albany Library blog, "Reference staff dusted off their Dewey Decimal knowledge with no online catalog to help. Most enterprising of all, a teen volunteer (looking like a coal miner with security lights ablaze) unloaded the bookdrop in the dark." 

Albany resident Ross Stapleton-Gray said he and his children were in the library when the power went out. 

"The staff did a great job of checking patrons' books out manually," he said in a e-mail to Albany Patch. "But when we left to head off to Berkeley Bowl West, we found all the traffic signals out at Marin and San Pablo, and a huge (but comparatively polite) mess, as cars were attempting to navigate what is the busiest, messiest intersection in all of Albany."

Albany police said they worked to get temporary barricades and stop signs set up as quickly as possible in about six locations throughout Albany when all the signal lights west of Masonic Avenue went out. 

Power to the lights was out for about three hours, according to the Police Department. 

Temporary stop signs were set up along San Pablo Avenue at Marin, Solano Avenue, Clay Street and Brighton Avenue. On Masonic, there were stop signs at Marin and Solano.

Reporting for this story was contributed by Bay City News Service.