All Power Finally Restored After Thursday's Explosion

Electrical service was restored today the all Southern California Edison customers in Long Beach who had been without power since an underground vault fire and explosion, the second such outage in as many weeks.

At least 30,000 customers initially were affected by the vault fire, which occurred at 4:15 p.m. Thursday near 10th Street and Pine Avenue, SCE spokeswoman Susan Cox said.

The last of about 70 utility customers who had been without service today were back online as of about 5 p.m., according to acting Long Beach public information officer Kerry Gerot.

Some customers were getting their power from temporary generators tonight and SCE will be switching them back onto the electrical grid through the night and into Sunday morning, Gerot said.

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

The community center at Cesar Chavez Park, at 401 Golden Ave., was reopened at 8 a.m. today to distribute ice and water.

SCE crews, some of them brought in from across SCE’s service area, began systematically checking about 300 underground vaults for potential heating, cable and component abnormalities at about 10 a.m. on Friday, Cox said.

Inspections were completed by about 5:30 p.m. on Friday on all but four vaults, according to Gerot, who said the remaining four were inaccessible and would be examined as soon as possible.

It’s unclear what caused the blast, but Cox said the problem was similar to underground electrical vault fires that knocked out power to 4,800 customers on July 15.

In that case, service wasn’t restored until July 19. No injuries were reported as a result of those fires, but some cast-iron manhole covers were blasted into the air and came down amid midday traffic.

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.