Long Beach residents offered money, apology after days-long power outage

Southern California Edison has offered an apology to its Long Beach customers and $100 toward the bills of those hardest hit by an extended blackout last week that left some without power for days.

The outage started July 15 about 3 p.m. and affected about 11,000 customers by the time service was fully restored Sunday, the company’s president, Pedro Pizarro, told the Long Beach City Council at its meeting Tuesday night.

He apologized for the extent and duration of the outage and said customers who were without power for more than 24 hours would receive a $100 credit on their next bill or the one after.

The blackout was the worst for Southern California Edison’s Long Beach customers since at least the 1950s, the company said.

Edison officials said the outage lasted so long for some because of Long Beach’s unique electrical design. The city’s grid is powered by a loop of electrical lines with no central beginning and end, said Paul Grigaux, vice president of transmission substations and operations for Edison.

The concept, Grigaux said, is that if one line fails, customers shouldn’t notice an interruption because the network will keep power flowing through the other cables.

But the design also means there’s no simple way to identify where a problem occurred, he said. Repair crews last week had to use trial and error, switching lines on and off until they found failed or weak lines.

Many local businesses closed up during the outage while some of the city’s most vulnerable residents had to rely on handouts of food, water, batteries and flashlights from the company and city.

The California Public Utilities Commission said it would investigate the cause of the outage and Edison’s response to it. The city of Long Beach and the utility are conducting their own inquiries.

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