Lights on, Berkeley BART stations open

(03-22) 14:28 PDT BERKELEY -- Electricity has been restored to all 27,000 customers of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in Berkeley who lost power this morning, including two BART stations in the city, the utility said.

After an outage of nearly two hours, PG&E restored service to all but about 3,000 customers just before 1 p.m., company spokeswoman Fiona Chan said. Power to the remaining customers was restored about 50 minutes later.

BART had been forced during the outage to run trains through its downtown Berkeley and North Berkeley stations without stopping. The stations are now open, BART said.

The outage affected much of downtown and neighborhoods north of the UC Berkeley campus. The cause of the power loss is still unclear, Chan said.