Huntington Beach outage leaves thousands of Edison customers in the dark — again

Lightning may not strike in the same place twice, but apparently power outages do.

Thousands of customers in and around Huntington Beach were without power for several hours Sunday night due to equipment failure near Brookhurst Street and Atlanta Avenue — the same location where another significant malfunction occurred one month earlier.

The incident took place shortly after 6 p.m., causing multiple traffic lights in the vicinity to black out and requiring Huntington Beach police officers to direct traffic temporarily. Signals at Brookhurst and Atlanta were still non-operable Monday, HBPD spokeswoman Jessica Cuchilla confirmed.

“Our officers went out to do traffic control at around 6 p.m. yesterday in the area where the outage happened,” she said. “Complete repairs are expecting to last several more hours, if not days.”

While most of the traffic lights were back up and running by around 9:30 p.m., customers in Huntington Beach and some in Costa Mesa had to wait even longer for power to be restored to nearby homes and businesses.

A sign warns cars of a signal outage on at the intersection of Atlanta Avenue and Brookhurst Street.

(Scott Smeltzer / Staff Photographer)

Edison spokesman Jeff Monford said a malfunction was recorded at 6:02 p.m. on Sunday that impacted approximately 6,720 customers for a five-hour period. A failed splice box was determined to have caused the outage.

That intersection of Brookhurst and Atlanta is the same location thought to have been at the epicenter of another outage that took place on Oct. 23, also a Sunday, and which also lasted for five hours.

Residents near Brookhurst and Atlanta initially reported seeing bright blue flashes in the sky before the lights went out, while others told police they’d heard loud noises there at around 8:20 p.m. that sounded like a vehicle collision.

The October incident affected some 15,700 customers as Edison employees took down several lines in an attempt to restore power. While the exact cause of that outage was not reported, Monford said Sunday’s incident was related to grid equipment failure and did not involve any transformers.

Electricity was fully restored by 11 p.m. Sunday night, he confirmed.

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