Two separate power outages on Sunday affected over 1,000 residents at their peak as temperatures soared—resulting in déjà vu among Long Beachers familiar with last year’s power outages.
Southern California Edison (SCE) Spokesman Robert Villegas said the first outage occurred at 6:49PM Sunday, initially affecting 749 customers, after an overhead equipment failure at East Stearns Street and East Patero Way. The outage was expected to be cleared at 3:30PM today, said Villegas.
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The second outage was caused by wires from the first outage falling onto an electrical pole that was part of another power grid, knocking out power for another 902 customers, according to Villegas. He said power was returned at 4:12AM Monday.
Villegas said there is no indication the incidents were caused by heat, but SCE worries about heat spells nonetheless.
“We always worry whenever there are consecutive days of heat,” said Villegas. “When there are multiple days of heat, there is no chance for [circuits] to cool down.”
Regarding last summer’s major power outages in Long Beach, purportedly caused by underground vault electrical fires and cable failures, which led to several manhole covers exploding and thousands of residents without power, Southern California Edison says several prevention measures have been established since then, while additional personnel have also been stationed throughout the region to better address an issues that may arise.
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“One of the things that we did is we had a variety of measures put in place after that event, a lot of maintenance work that was done, a lot of new components brought on to the system to ensure that we have some reliability,” said Villegas last week.