Home of the Soul Cookie

Downtown Oakland, at least what I could account for within a 3-4 block radius of my office, was without power for ’round about an hour.

Not sure what caused it; it’s been rainy here today, but not excessively. Didn’t smell smoke in the air — nor did I hear any distant boom — that could’ve indicated some sort of power center crisis.

Fire crews got scrambled to the area, though. In the early minutes of the outage I walked downstairs to play investigator and learned from a newly-arrived-on-the-scene firefighter that they were out en masse because, in his words, “there must be a hundred stuck elevators in the area.”

In the absence of anything better to do, a lot of office workers hung out at street level, milling about, hunting for passers-by with new, fresh answers to the “Do you know what happened?” query.

I saw several of the buildings a block over being evacuated very calmly, very methodically. Many of the people looked curious about the goings-on, but unwilling to look the gift horse of a prolonged break in the mouth. A few unfortunates were visibly bristling at the enforced respite, as if the delay was some sort of personal affront.

The BART station was dark, save for what little light bounced in. The electronic gates were stuck open (as I’d imagine they’re designed to do) and the lone security guard/BART cop looked strangely like he was a little nervous about his lot in life.