No Power Means Spoiled Restaurant Food, Low-Tech Banking

A jammed San Juan Capistrano's side streets but left shopping centers downright empty late Thursday afternoon.

Bank tellers were doing transactions by hand, which one called a "nightmare," and workers at and were preparing to toss out thousands of dollars' worth of warm meat.

"It's just been dead here," said Lois Kim, the manager of a small pharmacy in the El Adobe Plaza. 

She, too, had products that needed to be refrigerated and worried that if the outage—which has left millions without power from Yuma to Rosarito to Mission Viejo—lasted through the morning, it would “be a big problem.”

"But there's not much we can do about that," she concluded.

Across the way at , customers and employees used the outage their to advantage. In the warm afternoon sun, a small crowd sipped cocktails and beers—the only refreshment the manager said could be served.

With the exception of the restaurant at El Campeon, which drew lots of local customers but was counting the hours till its food spoiled, all in all, it seemed to be a good afternoon for workers who found there weren’t many customers to serve.

Ralphs closed its doors early to the disappointment of customers looking to buy ice. J. Frank Arguello said that in the 28 years that he’s lived in San Juan Capistrano, he can’t recall a power outage like this one.

“There’s been many, but none this extensive,” Arguello said. Still dressed in scrubs, he had come to the grocery store after leaving work at Mission Hospital early, because it was too warm to treat patients, he said.

The outage was triggered after a 500 kilovolt high-voltage line from Arizona to California tripped out of service. Much of Southern California’s electricity flows from out-of-state plants, and the failure of the high-voltage line cut most of the imported power to that part of the state.

San Juan Capistrano's utilities department activated its emergency generators to keep its water and sewer services running. The backup power in City Hall ran out shortly after the outage was first reported at 3:38 p.m., and city staffers set up stop signs at the major intersections because traffic signals went out.

Jesus Gonzalez, a manager at El Campeon, said drivers were using the El Adobe Plaza parking lot like a street to cut across the traffic at the Del Obispo and Camino Capistrano intersection. A minor traffic collision occurred shortly after, but no injuries were reported, said sheriff’s Lt. John Meyer.