Long Beach, News

5th power outage since July hits Long Beach

[sidebar title=”TIMELINE OF POWER OUTAGES” align=”right” background=”on” border=”left” shadow=”on”]

7/15/15 — First power outage

Approximately 4,800 customers went without power. The number was reduced to 2,700 by the next day.

7/18/15 — A majority of power restored

Southern California Edison and the City of Long Beach distributed nearly 8,000 water bottles, 2,100 meals, 500 flashlights and bags of ice to those affected by the outage.

7/30/15 — Second power outage

The blackout affected approximately 30,000 SCE customers and was caused by another vault fire underground.

8/01/15 — Power restored to all SCE customers

The remaining 260 customers affected by the blackout were provided power through temporary generators.

8/04/15 — SCE restores grid power to all customers

SCE officially committed to tethering all 307 manhole covers and vault locations in Downtown Long Beach as a safety precaution.

8/15/15 — Third power outage

Roughly 19,500 SCE customers were without power until about 1:30 a.m. the next day.

8/30/15 — Fourth power outage

Extreme heat damage of the SCE underground grids left hundreds without power for approximately 10 hours.

9/5/15 — Fifth power outage

A broken cross arm on an SCE grid left approximately 824 customers without power over the weekend.

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Following the fifth power outage to hit Long Beach in two months, the California Public Utilities Commissions recently called for an investigation of the electrical grid under the city.

Early Saturday morning a broken cross arm on one of the city’s power lines at Hackett Avenue left 824 Long Beach residents in the dark.

Several explosions and fires in underground vaults caused the first two incidences in July, leaving many areas of Long Beach in a complete blackout. The first outage took five days to restore power; the longest Long Beach has gone without power in 60 years.

The other outages in August are due to various causes, but are most likely weather related, according to Southern California Edison officials.

SCE officials said that they are trying to understand the root cause of the July events and are taking measures to ensure something like this does not happen again.

“We acknowledge we’ve fallen short of the expectations Long Beach residents have for electricity reliability,” David Song, a spokesperson for SCE, said. “We apologize and recognize the inconvenience the outages have caused.”

Aleksey Volchek, a graduate of California State University, Long Beach, said that the power outages affected his work at We Labs, a collaborative business space in Downtown Long Beach. Volchek said that the outages prevented businesses at We Labs from accommodating clients and set some of the start-up companies behind on their business models.

“I was out of work for days because the lab wasn’t able to accommodate [due to] the outages,” Volchek said.

Jamie Cueto, a senior recreational therapy major, said that the outages left his entire neighborhood in total darkness.

“That moment when you’re playing Amnesia [a video game] and the lights go off in the game and in reality is pretty scary,” Cueto said.

The investigation process behind the outages will involve investigations by three different companies – CPUC, SCE and an independent consultant.

“The next step is trying to understand why we even got to the point of these extended outages,” Song said. “Was it an issue with process, training or maps? We don’t want to miss anything.

SCE hired Davies Consulting, a Maryland based consulting firm, to help in their investigation of the city’s power grids. SCE officials said that Davies Consulting is helping to look into why the network protectors were not configured properly.

SCE said that the investigations will hopefully lead to a comprehensive understanding of why the consecutive outages unfolded as they did.

Song said, “[That understanding] will allow us to make meaningful and sustainable changes in our operation so these incidents never happen again.”

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