Part failure causes power outage affecting 10% of Laguna Beach residents

A blown part in an underground vault was blamed for an outage in Laguna Beach that cut power to nearly a tenth of the city’s population Monday morning, authorities said.

The outage affected 2,223 residents in the neighborhoods surrounding Alta Laguna Boulevard and Temple Hills Drive, the Police Department said on Twitter.

The part failure that started the outage is “like having a fuse in your house. If it happens to go, it shuts the circuit out,” said Laguna Beach fire Capt. Gary Ganger.

Southern California Edison spokesman Robert Villegas said the outage began at 7:33 a.m. and that power was restored to all but two customers by about 9:30 a.m. The last two customers should have their power back by 5:30 p.m., he said.

Support our coverage by becoming a digital subscriber.