San Diego Utility Restores Power to Almost Half of Blacked-Out Households
Line Failure Inflicts a ‘Night Without Power’ Upon San Diego
Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images
Passengers sit outside San Diego International Airport after a blackout in San Diego, California, on Sept. 8, 2011.
Passengers sit outside San Diego International Airport after a blackout in San Diego, California, on Sept. 8, 2011. Photographer: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images
Power Failure Affects Southern California, Arizona
Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)
Traffic is backed up after traffic lights were down after a blackout in San Diego.
Traffic is backed up after traffic lights were down after a blackout in San Diego. Photographer: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)
Sempra Energy (SRE)’s San Diego Gas & Electric said electricity supplies were restored to almost half of its customers in Southern California after a transmission line failure yesterday cut power to 1.46 million homes.
About 694,000 homes have been reconnected, the company said in a message posted today on Twitter. Electricity at San Diego International Airport is also restored, Jennifer Ramp, a spokeswoman for the utility, said by telephone. Local power plants are in the process of restarting, she said.
The fault snarled traffic, crippled emergency response systems and knocked out President Barack Obama’s televised speech. The blackout hit San Diego just before rush hour, on the night Obama addressed Congress on jobs and the economy and the NFL pro football season kicked off. Commuters languished as traffic lights went out in the region and emergency services were hampered as SDG&E lost power to its entire service area of 1.4 million customers.
“As we are energizing our system, we need Californians to conserve so we can safely restore the power,” Ramp said. “We are going to have high temperatures again.”
San Diego temperatures will reach as high as 78 degrees Fahrenheit today (26 Celsius) according to AccuWeather.com data on Bloomberg.
Worker Activity
A 500-kilovolt electric transmission line near Yuma, Arizona, tripped off, probably because of a worker’s activity, Arizona Public Service, one of the line’s owners, said in an e- mailed statement yesterday. The company said it is investigating why safeguards failed to isolate the problem.
San Diego International Airport, which handles about 300 flights daily, was operating on backup generator power and halted all outgoing flights, Rebecca Bloomfield, a spokeswoman, said yesterday.
The California National Guard was placed on alert, and the state’s Emergency Management Agency is on standby, said Jordan Scott, an agency spokesman.
“We’ve been in contact with everybody to make sure that at least the 911 lines are working,” he said.
The downed line, also owned by SDG&E and the Imperial Irrigation District, carries power from Arizona to Southern California, Ramp said yesterday. While it was back in service by around 7 p.m. local time, power to SDG&E customers won’t be restored until today, she said.
Nuclear Units Shut
Arizona emergency management officials were monitoring power losses to about 56,000 residents and businesses in the Yuma County area on the California border. Edison International (EIX)’s twin nuclear units at San Onofre, California, also shut down, leaving about 2,000 customers in Riverside and Orange counties without power, Charles Coleman, a spokesman for the utility, said in an e-mail.
The failure caused no safety problems at San Onofre, said Gil Alexander, a spokesman for Southern California Edison.
California ISO, the state’s electricity grid operator, suspended its power wholesale market at 6 p.m. local time “due to a transmission emergency.” The administrative price is set at $250 per megawatt-hour.
“The ISO has suspended its Automatic Dispatch System and will be providing verbal dispatches until further notice,” the grid operator said in an e-mailed notice to members.
Protect Against Surges
The ISO issued a Flex Alert asking people to conserve power and for customers without power to turn off air conditioners and appliances to protect against surges, it said in a statement.
Laureen Salvagnini, a Maryland resident, said her daughter and grandson in Yuma retreated to their car to keep cool in the 118-degree heat.
“They don’t have AC, so where can they go to get out of the heat?” Salvagnini said in an e-mail. “We are dealing with flooding here in Maryland and she’s with no power.”
Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power are increasing output to compensate for the loss in Southern California, said Don Boland, executive director of the California Utilities Emergency Association, which coordinates response to major power failures.
Residents of San Diego were caught off guard. A mile-long commute home from her Solana Beach office, north of San Diego, took about an hour, said Rachel Kay, president of Rachel Kay Public Relations.
“I saw tons of sirens and cops but I’m not sure where they were going,” she said. “Fire engines were blazing.”
Emergency Plans
Kay, reached by telephone at home yesterday, said she was barbecuing the food in her refrigerator before it went bad and said her neighbors were doing the same.
“Living in San Diego, I think most of us don’t have personal emergency plans, we just don’t have severe weather,” she said. “I don’t know where my flashlights are, I don’t have bottled water and I don’t have food after today.”
People were turning to their car radios for news, Jim Farley, chief executive officer of Leichtag Family Foundation in Carlsbad, said. Farley said he remained in his office near Legoland for a while after the lights went out, and canceled a charity reception at the La Costa resort.
The California ISO said it was coordinating with SDG&E and its neighboring utilities in Arizona and Mexico on restoring service to customers.
In February 2008, a field engineer diagnosing a malfunctioning switch on a substation in west Miami caused cascading power failures that affected millions of Florida Power & Light Co. customers in South Florida for hours. The utility eventually agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty as part of a settlement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The biggest blackout in the U.S. occurred on Aug. 15, 2003, triggered by the loss of several transmission lines in the U.S. Midwest. Those failures caused additional lines and plants to go out of service and disrupted power to 49 million households in eight states and Ontario.
The power failures shut the New York City subways, the nation’s largest transit system with 4.6 million riders daily.
To contact the reporters on this story: Lynn Doan in San Francisco at ldoan6@bloomberg.net; Michael B. Marois in Sacramento at mmarois@bloomberg.net; James Nash in Sacramento at jnash24@bloomberg.net Lars Paulsson in London at lpaulsson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Palazzo at apalazzo@bloomberg.net.
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