Power Restored To Most Areas
Power was back on today in areas of eastern and southwestern Riverside County that went dark because of a historic blackout that left some 5 million people without electricity from Mexico to southern Orange County.
But some east valley schools were set to remain closed Friday because of the outage.
Tens of thousands of Imperial Irrigation District and Southern California Edison customers in Riverside County lost power about 3:30 p.m. Thursday. The irrigation district reported that power was restored to 99 percent of its 150,000 customers by 9:30 p.m.
Friday school closures include the Coachella Valley Unified school district’s schools in Thermal. They are Desert Mirage High School, Toro Canyon Middle School and Las Palmitas Elementary School. Students who arrived before the normal start of morning classes Friday were seen being turned away by campus security officers. The schools said they needed to inspect the schools for possible electrical systems damage.
All schools in the Palm Springs Unified School District were set to open Friday as usual, along with all schools in the Desert Sands Unified School District.
During the outage, more than 60 patients were evacuated from Desert Springs Health Care nursing home in Indio, when a backup generator failed. Riverside County firefighters and other emergency personnel moved the patients to other facilities in the area.
The unprecedented outage originated near Yuma, Ariz., and affected homes and businesses in San Diego, Orange, and Imperial counties, parts of Arizona and Baja California.
It shut down the two reactors at the San Onofre nuclear power plant but the facility did not lose power or experience safety issues, according to its operator.
The California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s power grid, blamed the outage on the failure of a high-voltage power line between Arizona and Southern California, saying it affected all SDG&E customers and the customers of other utilities as well.
“The outage was triggered after a 500-kilovolt (kV) high-voltage line from Arizona to California tripped out of service. The transmission outage cut the flow of imported power into the most southern portion of California, resulting in widespread outages in the region,” according to Cal ISO.
The Arizona power company APS said the outage appears to have been related to a procedure an employee was carrying out in the North Gila substation northeast of Yuma.
Operating and protection protocols typically would have isolated the resulting outage to the Yuma area. The reason that did not occur in this case will be the focal point of an investigation now under way.
The Indio Police Department lost power for about 40 minutes and used backup generators, police spokesman Ben Guitron said. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department temporarily handled 911 calls, and Indio police officers were sent to monitor major traffic intersections.
Other cities in the affected area contract with the sheriff’s department for police services, so they handled their own 911 calls, La Quinta-based sheriff’s Lt. Jason Huskey said. He said officers set up traffic signs at major intersections in the city for traffic control when power went out.
