Hundreds Left Without Power For Third Day In Long Beach
LONG BEACH (CBSLA.com) — Southern California Edison crews Friday continued to work to restore power to all residents in Long Beach.
On Wednesday afternoon, power went out for 4,000 customers after three underground vault fires occurred.
One of the fires at 3rd Street and Chestnut Avenue caused a manhole cover to pop off.
Around 11 p.m. on Thursday, about 2,600 SCE customers remained without power.
According to city officials, efforts to restore power by testing the system resulted in additional underground fires and outages.
"We've got to find the problems, make sure we know where they're at," SCE spokesperson Steve Conroy said. "It's highly maintained. New components. New infrastructure. Obviously we had a failure yesterday. We haven't quite figured out why. That's part of the investigation. Right now, we're just trying to get the lights on."
A team of about 300 people were scheduled to work on repairs and further investigate the outage throughout the day today.
Shortly after 2 a.m., additional power tests sent smoke out of potholes in the area of 6th Street and Locust, which raised the number of customers without power to 5,200 people.
"Edison has been working around the clock to try and get power restored back to every customer that they have," said Long Beach Fire Department Chief Rich Brandt. "Right now, its pretty dangerous, especially at night. As they test the system and bring circuits back online, hopefully, we'll be back down to about 1,000 customers affected."
By 11 p.m. Friday, about 650 customers remained without power.
Officials handed out flashlights, ice and water at a senior citizen building located on Pacific Avenue to those who have been affected by the outage.
According to police, there has not been a rise in crimes since the outage occurred, however, there has been a surge of claims to SCE for reimbursement of spoiled food.
Officials have closed the 6th Street and Broadway exits on the southbound 710 Freeway as a result. The Anaheim and Shoreline exits are suggested alternates to enter the downtown area from the freeway.
Crews advised residents may continue to experience intermittent power outages.
