Like some Third World city, downtown Long Beach lost power twice in July and with it the confidence of some of its residents.
Southern California Edison, the utility company that provides power to Long Beach, needs to explain what happened and why a second underground vault that’s decades old caught fire and cut off power on Thursday.
In a disturbing replay of a scene that caused a four-day outage just two weeks earlier, people were stuck in elevators, a manhole cover exploded and businesses went dark.
The second time around, SCE was able to repair the outage in a day. But the damage was done.
Thousands were evacuated from the Long Beach Convention Center, tens of thousands of dollars in business were lost and doubt has risen about SCE’s infrastructure. The cost of the outages has not been fully tallied, but many expect it to easily reach into the millions.
Edison has promised to reimburse those who suffered losses and has already issued $100 credits for those who lost power.
Still that’s not enough. SCE needs to restore trust.
The Public Utilities Commission has said it will investigate. That should help.
Edison needs to answers serious questions about its maintenance, equipment and emergency response plans. The utility’s track record is not good.
In 2011, SCE grossly mishandled a windstorm that knocked out power for eight days in some areas of its coverage. The PUC found that Edison violated safety rules and discarded evidence needed to investigate failed poles and the outage. Moreover, the utility’s crisis-response plans were outdated; it took too long to restore power. In 2014, the commission penalized Edison $8 million for violations related to the windstorm.
Long Beach residents are rightly worried about their safety and businesses need to know there is a reliable infrastructure that can be counted on. But so far, SCE hasn’t provided sufficient reassurances. The utility company has publicly said it does not know the cause of the fires that led to the outages. Dramatic cellphone video of a vault exploding and photos of a couple of garages damaged by a flying manhole cover show just how dangerous these incidents can be.
To ease fears, SCE deployed about 100 inspectors on Friday to check the remaining 300 vaults in the city with infrared equipment, scanning for unusual heat or activity. That should have been done earlier. After the first outage SCE had said it had inspected nearby vaults. If so, why did this happen again? Many questions still need to be answered.
Assemblyman Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood, who chairs the Assembly’s utility committee, has asked for an independent investigation into the outages, and Mayor Robert Garcia has said he is “expecting answers quickly.”
Edison needs to show that residents can rely on safe, consistent services.
