Updated: Long Beach Neighborhoods Lose Power During Heat Wave, Again

An electrical vault fire knocked out electricity for a swath of Long Beach north of the downtown area for about an hour today, about the fourth time this summer the area has been left without power due to electrical problems.

The vault problem occurred in the 300 block of West Pacific Coast Highway around mid-afternoon, and Southern California Edison officials said more than 2,700 customers were initially without power. City Public Works officials said the outage affected an area bounded by Magnolia Avenue and Long Beach Boulevard, between Hill and 16th streets.

Electricity was quickly restored to about 1,800 customers, and the remaining 900 or so had power back within about an hour, SCE officials said.

The cause of the problem was not immediately known.

Earlier this summer, a series of vault fires in the downtown area affected thousands of Edison customers, with the outages in one instance lasting for days.

Mayor Robert Garcia, who has expressed concern about the repeated outages, wrote on his Twitter page today that although today’s problem only lasted about an hour, “the outages are getting tiresome and very frustrating

City News Service