San Diego : Fashion Valley Opening Delayed

A power failure lasting up to two hours Sunday delayed the opening of the Fashion Valley shopping center in Mission Valley.

The outage, blamed on an underground cable, occurred at 10:15 a.m., about 45 minutes before the mall’s 148 stores were to open for the day, said Marilee Bankert, the center’s director of marketing. Traffic lights at entrances on Friars Road also were knocked out.

Almost all of the stores had to open late because they could not operate equipment such as electronic cash registers, she said.

“We had a lot of shoppers here who were ready to shop,” Bankert said. “They were annoyed. They were delayed. They were a little bit irritated. But once things got going, it was pretty much OK.”

Bankert said the delay probably cost some stores a good deal of money. “An hour’s worth of Christmas shoppers--that, I could imagine, would come to quite a bit of money,” she said.

A San Diego Gas & Electric crew restored power to the western end of the mall by 11:15 a.m., spokeswoman Stephanie Smith said, adding that power was restored to the rest of the mall by 12:15 p.m.

She said that the outage was caused by a fault in an underground cable bringing power to the mall.