Spoiled food. Sewage backup. Essential machinery fried by power surges. Residents and business owners of Treasure Island—San Francisco’s most isolated neighborhood, and also one of its poorest—have been suffering from the island’s unreliable electric grid for years. A series of upgrades may finally help alleviate chronic blackouts on the former Navy base that is undergoing massive redevelopment.
The grid is just one piece of a difficult and delicate puzzle. SF is trying to balance the needs of Treasure Island’s 3,000 residents with plans to transform the island into a 21st-century neighborhood of 20,000 people. The sweeping makeover could take a decade, maybe two, to complete. For current residents, basic improvements can’t come soon enough.
“Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure,” says Barklee Sanders, who moved to the island in 2018 and keeps close tabs on the power problems. “That’s what they’ve needed to do for the last 30 years.”
Some of the Treasure Island grid was installed by the Navy and has been in place for 50 years. The life span was supposed to be half that, but it’s been patched time and again “with paper clips and Band-Aids,” says Jim Mirowski, who has run a winery on the island for 14 years.
A single incident, such as a tree branch or a flying goose hitting an overhead line, can black out the whole community.
Outage outrage
Treasure Island has experienced over 100 outages in the last 10 years, according to the SF Public Utilities Commission. Sanders estimates there have been over 170 outages since 2001.
New equipment, including powerful switches housed in green boxes in a gravel yard on the island’s east side, is meant to ensure that an errant goose or blown fuse doesn’t cause an island-wide blackout.
But residents and businesses aren’t out of the dark yet. The switchyard was activated on May 10, and power is flowing from a new cable that snakes under the bay from Oakland. However, it’s not yet hooked up to the island’s residential neighborhood roughly a half-mile away. There won’t be a connection until the end of the year, according to SFPUC press secretary Will Reisman. Once connected, the neighborhood should be shielded from outages elsewhere on the island.
The extra wait is yet another slight for islanders, especially because the first new overhead line bypasses them and runs to neighboring Yerba Buena Island, where condominiums are under construction — the first new housing of the redevelopment.
In a January 5 meeting of the island’s citizen advisory board, Sanders asked why current residents weren’t getting first dibs on the new reliable power source. Treasure Island Development Authority director Robert Beck didn’t answer the question head-on. Instead, he said the developer of the Yerba Buena construction paid for the new line, and that TIDA has paid for improvements to the existing grid.
“It was kind of a slap in the face when I saw that line going up,” Sanders says, adding that it felt like TIDA and the developer were prioritizing the construction of housing for future residents over the needs of current residents.
There have already been eight outages in 2021, three of them island-wide.
When asked about priorities, SFPUC assistant general manager of power Barbara Hale referred the question to TIDA, and emphasized that the authority controls the agenda and timetable for development. “TIDA sets the electric rates out there, TIDA sets the program for improvement, and we act as a contractor to them,” she says.
TIDA director Beck did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
No corks popping
Sanders and other advocates on the island acknowledge that there’s some progress. Fault indicators and recloser devices installed last summer (akin to circuit breakers) now help locate the source of outages more quickly and limit their spread and duration. “Bird guard” protection against feathered fowl-ups should be complete this summer, and old transformers in the residential neighborhood should be replaced by October, according to the SFPUC. (A summary of electrical projects is available here.)
“They are going through a process that is ultimately going to replace everything,” according to Hale. “All the electrical will be replaced over the development period.”
Although the “development period,” with 8,000 new units on the table, could last until at least 2035, current islanders hope to have reliable power within six months.
Wine maker Mirowski won’t be popping corks in celebration quite yet: “They still have a long way to go.”
Just as Barklee Sanders was getting ready to present to an advisory board meeting online, the power went out. ‘I was all prepped to talk about power outages, and then it happened.’
Mirowski’s wariness is understandable. The crucial switchyard work was originally slated to finish by the end of last year. The date was then pushed back to January, and then to the last week of April. According to Reisman, there were numerous reasons for the delays—including difficulty sourcing parts, a three-month delay in geotechnical work by the developer, and errors in the preparation of the site.
Already in 2021, there have been eight outages. Three of them, all island-wide, were packed into 10 days in April; the other five were limited in scope because of previous improvements.
Problems and solutions
Mirowski says power surges have destroyed his equipment and outages have cost him hundreds of dollars: “It’s just frustrating as all hell.”
He was once in the middle of bottling thousands of cases of wine when the power went out. He was spending $200 an hour to rent the mobile bottling line whether or not it was idle, and then had to rent a generator, setting him back an extra $300. By the time he got back to the winery with the generator, the power had returned.
Sanders, a 27-year-old Facebook employee, started tracking power outages when he moved to Treasure Island in 2018. The problem was impossible to ignore. During his first year on the island, food in his fridge went bad, and his neighbors’ toilets were spilling sewage into their homes. Others on the island used medical devices that relied on electricity. A couple months ago, Sanders was getting ready to join a virtual meeting of TIDA’s citizen advisory board, to which he was appointed late last year, when the power went out.
“I was all prepped to talk about power outages, and then it happened,” Sanders says, adding that he had to drive into the city and rent a hotel room to join the meeting.
Sanders isn’t just the island’s top grid watchdog. He’s also been stumping for solar power and rechargeable batteries that can be used during outages as part of a long-term solution. He has presented his idea (his slideshow is featured on his website’s homepage) to TIDA’s board of directors, but the board has not committed to adopting any of his recommendations.
To prove his point, Sanders has parked a solar-powered trailer behind his house to charge batteries that he uses when the power fails. The trailer also contains a refrigerator where he and his neighbors can store food during outages. (Sanders got the trailer at no cost through the Footprint Project, which supplies solar power to disaster areas in the United States.)
One obstacle to getting broader help is Treasure Island’s unique status. Because current residents are not PG&E customers — the island’s grid is owned by the city — they are ineligible for state subsidies that reward customers who generate their own power. Sanders is pushing District 6 Sup. Matt Haney to help change the law.
“I’m pretty relentless at providing solutions to people,” Sanders says.
Looking forward
Reliable electricity for Treasure Island may be a big step closer, but those who live and work on the island must still contend with a host of other challenges. A coalition of residents and business owners heatedly oppose a proposed Bay Bridge toll meant to discourage driving and fund alternative transportation. The Bay Bridge is the only way on and off the island. Problem is, the big alternative, a ferry to the mainland, is nowhere near ready and won’t be at full service for roughly 15 years.
Residents past and present worried about radioactive materials left by the Navy have filed a class action lawsuit that was recently amended. And the new vision for the island includes an engineering challenge: an elevation gain to protect against rising bay waters.
Treasure Island is supposed to be one of several large projects that add tens of thousands of new homes, both market-rate and subsidized, to SF’s housing stock as the city, the region, and the state try to solve a housing crunch. But as the island’s problems, electrical and otherwise, demonstrate, the road to much-needed growth must navigate potholes and not leave existing communities in the dust.
Max Harrison-Caldwell covers local news for The Frisc.
