Power almost fully restored in Long Beach after massive outage

Southern California Edison employees look over plans near the vault that caught fire on Thursday evening leading to the second power outage in downtown Long Beach.

The outage two weeks ago was triggered when fires broke out in three underground vaults and damaged a power grid that proved extremely hard and tedious to fix.

A power outage in Southern California on Thursday left thousands without electricity and backed up traffic on one of the Los Angeles area’s busiest interstates, authorities said.

The outages occurred about two weeks after a similar incident in the downtown Long Beach area left thousands without power. Four vaults remained uninspected because they were now inaccessible. There are more than 75 crews, which includes over 150 people, working on repairs.

The outage originated Thursday afternoon when a massive underground vault exploded.

Long Beach officials have been upset with Edison over the second outage, expressing frustration with further disruption. “So we’ll be continuing to work with SCE to try to get those answers, and SCE wants those answers as well to prevent any future occurrences”.

SCE officials said they are placing generators in areas that do not have power. Service was not expected to be restored until Friday, Cox added.

As the underground network system is restored, SCE will transition these customers off the generators, according to the release.

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.

According to officials, the blackout was caused by a vault explosion and cut power to about 30,000 residents in Long Beach, the Los Angeles Times reported.

This story has been updated.