A bird was the cause of Sunday’s power outage in Petaluma, says PG&E

Nearly 18,000 PG&E customers in Petaluma were without electricity for several hours midday Sunday, apparently after a bird flew into power equipment and disabled it.

A PG&E spokeswoman had no further details on where the equipment was or what exactly the bird struck.

At its 11 a.m. peak, 17,670 customers throughout Petaluma went dark. All had power restored by 2:30 p.m., PG&E said.

Traffic signals were out or blinking red all over town, causing massive traffic backups, residents reported, and some confusion at how to proceed at four-way stops.

Petaluma public works employees hustled to restore the traffic signals, while police in cars monitored major intersections.

“Believe it or not, we had no collisions,” Petaluma police Sgt. Lance Novello said. “People figured it out real quick.”

The city’s public safety dispatch system was overwhelmed shortly before 11 a.m. as hundreds of callers dialed 911 to report their power was out and as alarm companies serving banks and businesses reported system trips.

“To say hundreds of calls would be conservative,” Novello said.

A large percentage were reporting the outage, but a significant number were just calling to rant, he said.

“The dispatchers fielded several vile phone calls from very angry people,” he said. “Not necessarily angry at the police, just angry this was happening.”

An extra dispatcher was called in to help with the overload.

Luckily, Novello said, only three actuals calls for service were reported during the outage.

“For nothing going on it was chaos for a while,” he said.

City officials for a time urged customers to limit water usage during the outage because the city’s water pumps operate on electricity.

Along the SMART train tracks, warning lights and crossing arms remained in service, powered by generators, along the route through Petaluma. But the outage triggered extra caution and delayed all trains for 10 to 15 minutes during the midday, SMART officials said on social media.

A PG&E helicopter flew overhead following power lines to help pinpoint equipment problems.

Several businesses had to either close or cut back on their services with the lack of electricity.

“Downtown is a prime location if you’re going out for the day and coming to Petaluma, you’re going to say, ‘Let’s have breakfast downtown,’’ said Marie McCusker, executive director of the Petaluma Downtown Association. “I can only imagine it will be a hard hit for downtown breakfast, brunch and lunch places.”

On the other hand, potential diners may have gone instead to the less-affected east side, she said, creating a bump for them.