Three power outages occur at Hall of Justice

Three power outages have occurred within the span of roughly three hours at San Francisco’s Hall of Justice Tuesday, a sheriff’s spokeswoman said.

The most recent outage was reported at 5:43 p.m. at the courthouse located at 850 Bryant St., San Francisco Sheriff’s Department Chief Deputy Kathy Gorwood said.

Gorwood had no estimated time of when power would be restored.

Power first went out around 3 p.m. for the entire building, she said.

PG&E was notified of an outage at 3:40 p.m. at the courthouse at 850 Bryant St., but determined service to the building was never interrupted and that the outage was a “customer-caused issue” involving other infrastructure in the building, PG&E spokesman Nick Smith said.

Smith said PG&E crews are on the scene assisting in restoring power.

The city has jails cells located on the sixth and seventh floors of the building where a backup generator quickly restored power and emergency lights immediately turned on, Gorwood said.

Currently there are no inmates on the sixth floor, she said. Power was restored by about 4 p.m., according to Gorwood.

A second outage was reported less than an hour later at 4:50 p.m. and the backup generator gave limited power to the cells, she said.

Inmates were confined to their cells and their movement was restricted before power returned shortly before 5:30 p.m., she said.

The Hall of Justice houses the headquarters of the San Francisco Police Department and the district attorney’s and medical examiner’s offices, as well as dozens of courtrooms and two county jails.