City Patches Candlestick Park Power System, and Waits Gambling that the lights will stay on at Candlestick Park during a nationally televised football playoff game this weekend, the City of San Francisco decided to punt on plans to replace two aging electrical switches that were blamed for blackouts during the 49ers" final regular-season home game last month. A broken feeder line, and slow-acting and faulty electrical switches inside the dilapidated stadium, caused two blackouts during the Niners" televised Monday night game against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Dec. 19, failures that Mayor Ed Lee called a "national embarrassment." But the switches remain in place after the city, which owns and operates the stadium, decided to patch, rather than replace, the outdated equipment. Pacific Gas & Electric spent $1 million to replace monitoring equipment, utility poles and 1.6 miles of power lines around Candlestick after the debacle last month. It urged the city to buy a more modern switch, which could cost as much as $1 million, engineers said. Instead, city officials left it alone and gave another crucial switch a less-costly tune-up. The 49ers are planning to build a stadium in Santa Clara for the 2014 or 2015 season, after which the 51-year old Candlestick will probably be razed to make way for waterfront homes. The blackouts in the Dec. 19 game occurred after an overhead electrical wire feeding power from PG&E's grid into the stadium snapped at a place where an earlier repair had become corroded. The wire broke just before kickoff, and power continued flowing into the stadium through a backup line. But a switch inside the stadium took as long as five seconds to switch over to the backup power line, according to Barbara Hale of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which led an investigation into the disruptions. Even a brief power interruption causes the stadium's high-intensity metal halide lights to go out. They must cool for 10 or 15 minutes before they can be restarted, and require several more minutes to reach full intensity. The lights went out again in the second quarter after a second switch malfunctioned, which led to another delay. Lighting manufacturers said that even a new switch would not operate quickly enough to prevent a blackout if the main power line failed again. So, Ms. Hale said, city officials decided to leave it in place. A faulty switch that caused the second blackout was repaired. "They reset all the electronic settings," she said. The utility company announced plans to triple the number of engineers and other workers available to troubleshoot any problems at the stadium this weekend. City officials said they would send 13 electricians, nearly twice the normal number. The game against the New Orleans Saints begins at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, and the lights will most likely be switched on at halftime or later, said Jim Mercurio, the stadium's operations and security vice president. "It just depends on the shadowing," he said.