Electrical Failure Blacks Out Customers in Huntington
Thousands of Huntington Beach residents lost electric power Sunday evening after electrical equipment failed.
The failure meant 6,500 customers lost power for about two hours. By 8:45 p.m., electricity was restored to all but 380 homes in an area around Brookhurst Street and Hamilton and Adams avenues, said Ray Golden, a spokesman for Southern California Edison.
The outage was unrelated to recent statewide electrical shortages.
Huntington Beach police were bombarded with calls about the outage because it came as residents saw and heard what they thought was an explosion.
Golden said the sparks and noise were caused by automatic shutdown of a circuit breaker and were not unusual. The breaker automatically turned off because a wire fell to the ground, he said. This may have occurred because a metal attachment somehow lost its grip on the wire, he said.
“There were initial reports of a transformer explosion,” he said. “But it was just sparks and a wild bang from the circuit breaker.”
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