Powerage Outage Included 120 Emergency Calls

Long Beach city officials counted 120 emergency calls over the 54 hours of power outage in the downtown area, as power was restored to all but 200 of the 4,800 blacked out customer accounts.

Southern California Edison spokeswoman Lois Pitter Bruce told City News Service crews were still working around the clock, and had no estimate when underground conduits would be completely functional.

Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia said at a news conference Friday that most of the still-dark customers were close to the city’s Civic Center, the site of the original outage Wednesday afternoon.

Edison officials said they was continuing to monitor voltage levels and troubleshooting its underground system.

About 2,700 customers were without power Friday afternoon, according to Long Beach interim Public Information Officer Kerry Gerot.

The outage was caused by fires in three underground vaults that were reported about 3:40 p.m. Wednesday and initially cut power to around 4,800 customers, Edison said.

No injuries were reported, but some cast-iron manhole covers were deformed as they blasted into the air with explosive force and came to earth amid midday vehicular and pedestrian traffic in the city’s downtown streets.

City News Service