Electrical Fire Knocks Out Power To Thousands In Long Beach

About 70 Southern California Edison customers in Downtown Long Beach were still without power Saturday morning as the power company scrambles to restore service following an underground vault explosion on Thursday.

Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia has said the outages have had a negative economic impact on the order of millions of dollars and wants the situation to be investigated by the state Public Utilities Commission. Power was brought back shortly before 5 p.m. The customers affected by the outage are roughly bounded by Lily Way to the north, Pacific Avenue to the west, Tribune Court to the east and Nardo Way to the south, SCE said.

“They’re continuing with the repairs in the original vault fire outage area today”, Gerot said. Four vaults remained uninspected because they were now inaccessible.

For the second time in one month, a power outage pushed into the third day in Long Beach leaving residents without power on Saturday.

That number dropped to about 1,000 by late Thursday and 270 by Saturday morning.

“The city is continuing to work with [Edison] executives to make sure that this doesn’t happen again”. He added he didn’t know how soon it would be restored to them.

SCE was able to provide interim power to residents who were previously without power using transportable generators.

At the height of this recent outage, which began Thursday afternoon, 30,000 customers were without power, according to the release.

Customers being switched off generators were warned to expect an outage that could last up to 45 minutes.

However, the problem also stretched beyond Long Beach neighborhoods and onto surrounding freeways.

As of Saturday morning, 260 customers are without a permanent source of electricity, but 190 of those are now on 10 generators, according to a press release from the city.

This story has been updated.