Power Outage Hits Palm Desert And El Paseo Shops

An outage that left much of the El Paseo shopping district without electricity early today was expected to be fixed around midmorning, a spokeswoman for Southern California Edison said today.

The outage, caused by a problem in an underground cable, affected 1,097 customers, starting at 6:43 a.m. By about 7:40 a.m., that number was cut too 148 customers, just south of El Paseo, Lois Pitter-Bruce of SCE said.

“A majority of folks are taken care of,” she said.

UPDATE: Electricity has been restored to all but 148 of the Southern California Edison customers in Palm Desert affected by a Wednesday morning power outage. About an hour after the outage began, the power was back on for the majority of customers, with only a small area near El Paseo and Portola Avenue still without electricity as of 10 a.m.