Breastmilk scare, candlelight mass: Richmond District still without power

"Restaurants and businesses shuttered on one of the busiest weekends of the year, and the Star of the Sea Church was forced to have a candlelit mass on Sunday morning, after the citywide blackout left a vast swath of the Richmond still without electricity. Fiorella, an Italian restaurant on Irving Street in the Inner Sunset, lost power in the middle of lunch service around 1 p.m. on Saturday. Its sister location on Clement Street is still closed due to the outage."

"The restaurant has to cancel its dinner service on Saturday evening, as the promised restoration time kept changing, from 5 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. to 6:15 p.m., said the manager Daniella Schindler. "It was already getting dark, and I can't have people working in the dark," said Schindler. She remembered joking to her employees, "If you were to cut your fingers behind the bar I won't even be able to see it.""

""It was supposed to be one of our busiest nights," she said. The restaurant had dinner reservations for 182 people on Saturday night, and on top of that, Schindler expected 100 or so walk-ins. The restaurant might have lost about $18,000 to $20,000 in transactions, she said. "It was difficult," Schindler said. "Lots of reservations are families visiting here for the holidays. I have to cancel them because there's nothing I can do.""

More than 14,000 households in the Richmond District remained without power as of Sunday at 2 p.m., more than 24 hours after a Saturday morning outage. Restaurants and businesses closed during a busy weekend, and the Star of the Sea Church held a candlelit mass. Fiorella lost power during lunch and canceled dinner service, affecting 182 reservations and about 100 expected walk-ins, with estimated losses of $18,000–$20,000. The blackout initially affected about 125,000 households primarily on the west side and near Haight Ashbury and Civic Center. PG&E crews deployed generators and worked on permanent repairs at locations such as Anza Street and 25th Avenue.

Read at Mission Local