Planned maintenance leave 64,000 SoCal Edison customers without power

With temperatures exceeding 90 degrees in some areas, tens of thousands of residents throughout Southern California had their power shut off for planned maintenance.

"Unfortunately, when there's an outage, there's no A/C," said customer Carol Allen.

SoCal Edison said the planned power outages allow crews to update electrical infrastructure by replacing poles, power lines and transformers. 

"Maintenance outages happen year-round, but out of the 30-40,000 maintenance outages that Edison schedules, a bulk of them happen in the milder months. We're talking January to May 31," said Southern California Edison spokesperson David Song. 

As of Monday morning, 1,063 outages affected 64,066 customers out of Edison's 5 million, for about six to eight hours amid the dead heat of summer. 

"I have an elderly father that lives with me," said customer Janine Ying who not only had her power shut off for several hours on Monday but will have another planned outage on Tuesday. "We had to make arrangements for him today and tomorrow."

Song said that because of the sheer amount of planned outages Edison cannot schedule them during other months which unfortunately pushes them during the summer. 

"These others happen in summer because we can't schedule all in the milder months," Song said. "So, some do have to happen."

But the outages coupled with the rising inflation, have residents like Ying concerned for the future.

"My groceries are going to go bad and I'm going to have to replace them," she said.