A mechanical engineer who ran a battery of tests in a South Berkeley apartment found no apparent cause for the carbon monoxide poisoning that killed a couple and their cats.
The apartment where a young Berkeley couple and their cats were found dead in January has been "red tagged" by city staff, and the building owner has been directed to have the unit inspected by a licensed contractor before anyone can live there again.
Update 4:28 p.m. Despite what PG&E has told Berkeleyside, readers are saying their power is still out. According to the outage map, there are 18 outages still reported in Berkeley that are impacting 8,160 customers.
Update, 1:30pm: PG&E said that, as of 1 p.m., power to all customers impacted by the outages had been restored. They are continuing to look into the equipment failure that caused it, according to a spokeswoman.
Update, 1:47 p.m. PG&E spokeswoman Tamar Sarkissian said the outage was caused by an underground equipment failure, and that power has been restored to all customers.
Update, 10:35 p.m. A squirrel that scampered into a substation in El Cerrito caused the outage that deprived much of the East Bay of power for two and a half hours, according to PG&E.
Update, 3:30 p.m. PG&E spokeswoman Tamar Sarkissian said Friday afternoon that the company has identified the cause of Tuesday’s power outage as an equipment failure during testing at an East Bay substation.
More than 48 hours after a sweeping power outage left 38,000 PG&E customers in Berkeley and surrounding cities without electricity, the company still has not released the cause of the problem.
Update, 4:45 p.m. PG&E spokeswoman Tamar Sarkissian said Tuesday’s outage, at its peak, affected about 38,000 customers, 29,000 of whom were in Berkeley. The remaining outages affected people in surrounding cities.
PG&E officials are warning that strong winds are expected to sweep Berkeley and other parts of the East Bay beginning at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 30. They are expecting that some homes will lose power because of downed power lines.
Berkeley city workers handled more than 100 requests related to flooding, and more than 30 calls for tree-related issues, Thursday during a large storm that has been sweeping the Bay Area, authorities said.
More than 5,000 customers are without power in North Berkeley and El Cerrito, according to PG&E’s outage map.
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