Generators Providing Electricity To Long Beach Residents Who Remain In The Dark
LONG BEACH (CBSLA.com) — More than 200 residents in Long Beach had to endure the day without power on Friday after another underground vault explosion caused an outage.
Southern California Edison crews were utilizing five generators to provide electricity to the nearly 254 customers that remained without power across a three-block radius.
Across Long Beach on Friday, crews with the electricity supply company were busy removing manhole covers in order to enter 300 vaults situated underneath city streets.
"We're trying to make any repairs we can. We're not gonna complete those repairs this evening due to actually having to do some civil work, digging up the actual concrete to pull out the cable that was damaged yesterday," Steve Conroy with Southern California Edison said.
Southern California Edison had hoped to be done with this and fully restore service. The generators are providing a temporary fix.
Firefighters with the Long Beach Fire Department in the interim responded to the emergency in their own way by making pizza deliveries to residents who were still impacted.
The fire occurred shortly before 5 p.m. Thursday when two underground vaults failed after an electrical circuit serving downtown malfunctioned, according to the City of Long Beach.
About 30,000 customers were left without power in the area of Pacific to Locust avenues and Lily to 7th streets.
"At the height, we have 30,000 customers without power last night which is even more than the first outage," said Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia. "I met again today with the president of Edison this morning and, you know, was very clear that this is a completely unacceptable situation for the city."
The outage marked a second time the area has been without power this month.
On July 15, three underground vaults short-circuited power, which left thousands without power for several days.
"I don't think we missed anything. We did inspect vaults that we thought were damaged," Conroy said.
"They should find out the root problem of this because it cost me three days of work last time," said one resident, while another said: "Something needs to be done. We can't be doing this every week."
"We're doing everything we can to push Edison as hard as we can to ensure that they fix their system and know with confidence what happened," the mayor added.
Those who have suffered a loss or damage due to the outage may submit a claim via the Southern California Edison website.