Power outage interrupts BART service in central, east Contra Costa County

CONCORD — An electrical power outage on Wednesday caused BART to shut down service on the line that serves central and eastern Contra Costa County.

Service on the Yellow Line between the Walnut Creek and Concord stations went black about 12:30 p.m., because of a power outage at a substation, spokesperson Chris Filippi said. Earlier, that power outage prevented service between Concord and Pittsburg/Bay Point, he said.

The Yellow Line runs from Antioch through transfer stations in Oakland, across the Bay and out to San Francisco International Airport.

BART did not have an estimate for when service would be fully restored.

Major delays and shutdowns have plagued BART since May. Unscheduled track maintenance affected trains moving through San Francisco on June 11. A fire near the tracks between the Daly City and Balboa Park stations caused BART to shut down service between those stations on May 27, the day BART opened back up after a fire near the San Leandro station the previous work affected service between the Lake Merritt, Berryessa and Dublin stations.

On May 9, the agency suffered a systemwide closure that affected thousands of commuters and shut down all 50 BART stations for nearly five hours. That closure was caused by a network connectivity issue that prevented controllers from seeing train locations on the tracks and made safe operation of the system impossible.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.