Short Briefly Cuts Power to Thousands
More than 15,600 Southern California Edison customers in Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach lost electrical service for an hour Sunday morning when an animal caused a short circuit at a power substation.
The 11:18 a.m. outage was blamed on an unknown type of animal that crawled across a positive and negative terminal in the substation at 1909 Vanderbilt Lane in Redondo Beach. The animal was killed instantly by the short circuit in the 16,000 volt line, Edison spokesman Bob Krauch said.
The mishap activated a circuit breaker that shut down the line and caused a small fire that was doused by the repair crew. Police reported that the outage knocked out many traffic signals and triggered burglar alarms.
Edison workers restored power to 90% of the customers within 25 minutes and to the remainder within an hour, Krauch said.
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