An underground PG&E vault fire at Haight and Cole streets in the Upper Haight briefly forced neighbors to shelter in place early Friday. It was contained in about 25 minutes; 75 PG&E customers were still dark hours later.

The alarm came in before most of the Upper Haight was awake. At 5:23 a.m. Friday, San Francisco firefighters were called to Haight and Cole streets, where an underground electrical vault was burning, according to the San Francisco Fire Department. SFist, reporting the incident independently, described it the same way: a fire in one of PG&E's underground vaults, in the heart of Haight-Ashbury.

While crews worked the fire, officials issued shelter-in-place orders for the immediate area — the kind of order that empties a block's sidewalks before the first coffee is poured. PG&E crews responded alongside the fire department and helped make the vault safe enough to extinguish, the department said. The fire was contained by 5:48 a.m., roughly twenty-five minutes after the first call, and the shelter-in-place orders were lifted shortly after.

The blaze did not spread to any other structures, and no injuries were reported, per SFFD. But the corner did not simply go back to normal. As of 8:55 a.m., 75 PG&E customers near Haight and Cole remained without power, according to the utility's outage map. The cause of the fire is under investigation.

For anyone walking the block that morning, the tell would have been the darkened storefronts near the intersection and the utility crews still working the vault beneath the street — a reminder that the grid the neighborhood runs on sits, mostly unseen, right under the sidewalk.