By Khalida Sarwari
A power outage that affected more than 12,000 PG&E customers in central San Jose this morning was caused by a balloon colliding with a power line, a company spokeswoman said.
More than 12,000 customers lost power at about 10:50 a.m. in an area roughly bounded by San Carlos Street, Interstate Highway 280, Clifton Avenue and Race Street, PG&E spokeswoman Fiona Chan said.
As of 3 p.m., power had been restored to all but 30 customers. They are expected to have their power back around 6 p.m., Chan said.
She said the outage was caused by a balloon coming into contact with a power line at the intersection of San Carlos and Willow streets. Equipment failure at the local PG&E substation contributed to the outage, she said.