Power Outages Hit Thousands Of Southern California Homes
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — This week's heat wave just got hotter after power was knocked out to thousands of customers throughout Los Angeles County.
Utility crews were working Tuesday to restore power to about 7,000 customers throughout Los Angeles County, including about 3,000 in the city of Los Angeles.
Southern California Edison officials said the utility reached its year-to-date consumption of 23,055 megawatts on Monday, just shy of its all-time weekday peak of 23,303 on Aug. 31, 2007.
"Hopefully everything will be okay in the morning," resident Monica O'Brien said. "We may have to throw out some food and such."
O'Brien said she has been receiving text messages from Southern California Edison, updating her on the situation.
Among the communities affected as of mid-morning in the city of Los Angeles was the Los Feliz area, where about 1,100 customers were without electricity, LADWP spokeswoman Jane Galbraith said. Some residents said they had been without power for 15 hours.
"Hottest day ever, and it goes out. And that's probably what happened, was that everyone turned on their AC, " Julia McCabe said from her Los Feliz apartment. McCabe opened all her windows and doors for some modicum of relief, but said that most of the food in her refrigerator was probably going to go bad.
School air conditioning systems were also overtaxed, with at least one Los Angeles Unified School District campus having to conduct class in the dark to keep cool. At another campus, water fountains went out.
"I said, its not fair, because like other schools, they have water fountains and they work and ours are not working right now," said David Sufle, a student at 93rd Street Elementary School.
Overnight, outages were also reported in Brentwood and Sherman Oaks.
In SCE's jurisdiction, about 4,000 customers were without electricity as of 10:15 a.m., the utility reported. Because of the continuous usage during this heat wave, SCE says they have canceled all non-essential maintenance outages and replaced 245 transformers between Saturday and Tuesday morning.
To conserve energy, customers should set their thermostats at 78 degrees between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m., the time of day it takes the most power to cool a room. Reserve the use of major appliances to evening hours, limit how often the refrigerator door is opened, use electric fans instead of air conditioners where possible and keep blinds and curtains closed to keep out the sun.
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