Electrical vault malfunction to blame for Long Beach power outage

A malfunction in an underground electrical vault knocked out power for a swath of Long Beach north of the downtown area for about an hour Thursday, the fourth time this summer a part of the city has been left without service.

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.

Jake Heflin of the Long Beach Fire Department said that despite initial reports from city officials, there was smoke but no fire or explosion in the vault, as was the case in outages earlier this summer, when a series of vault fires in the downtown area affected thousands of Edison customers.

In one of those earlier instances, the outages lasted for days.

Thursday’s outage was on a different part of the grid than the earlier ones, David Song of SCE said.

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

 

— City News Service