20,000 without power in north, central California

SAN FRANCISCO - About 20,000 Pacific Gas & Electric Co. customers were without power in Northern and Central California Saturday night.

Gusty winds were to blame for much of the outage, said PG&E spokesman Jonathan Franks. The city of Santa Rosa in Sonoma County was one of the hardest hit, with 2,000 customers without power due to a downed wire.

Elsewhere, 1,600 customers also lost power in Menlo Park and about 3,000 remained without power in East Oakland. Equipment failure rather than weather apparently was to blame for the outage in Oakland, Franks said.

The company hoped to restore power to those customers by 9:45 p.m. Saturday night.

Franks said there is currently no estimated time of restoration for the remaining areas.

The National Weather Service has expanded its wind advisory to the entire San Francisco Bay area until noon Sunday.