ktvu's debora villalon is live with the latest on the power outage that is just now coming to an end. >> reporter: that is right ken. we're at 10th and broadway, part of the outage that ended about half an hour ago. as it got dark police laid flares at intersections and asked chp and county sheriffs for patrol help. they were concerned about collisions, and break-ins because of disabled alarms and on this day, when pg&e had a failure, both police and fire did, too. >> do you see the change in color? does she have any history of heart problems? >> reporter: oakland fire dispatchers had a heart- stopping moment when their computers died. fire dispatch downtown was inside the outage zone. the backup generator kicked in, but because of some glitch, didn't feed juice to the automated system. >> they went to the old, old system of handwriting the calls as the calls came in, instead of processing it into a computer screen. they had to do everything by hand on paper. >> reporter: for an happy new year it was old-school, index cards and a white board to keep track of everyone. hand held radios