San Joaquin County power outage impacts thousands of PG&E customers in unrelated outage to safety shutoffs

TRACY — Tens of thousands of PG&E customers in San Joaquin County were without power Thursday evening due to an unplanned power outage unrelated to the Public Safety Power Shutoffs across the state.

Just over 57,000 customers in San Joaquin County were affected by an unplanned outage, according to the company's online outage map as of 10:20 p.m.

The majority of the affected customers were in the cities of Tracy, Manteca, and Lathrop.

PG&E said crews began "de-energizing" some customers in the county around 4:30 p.m. to rebalance the grid. This outage is not related to the Public Safety Power Shutoffs impacting the county and others across California through this weekend.

PG&E said the outage was expected to last around 90 to 120 minutes, but the outage continued well into the night and into Friday morning for tens of thousands of customers.

 By Friday afternoon, power was restored.   

People like Leonel Cabrera in Manteca were at home around 3 p.m. when his power turned off suddenly.

"I found out it's not the house, it's the whole city," Cabrera said.

As the sun went down, the streets stayed dark. Busy intersections were without street signals.

"On my way here, there was almost a crash at the stoplight because everybody was just flabbergasted at the stoplight," Cabrera said.