Palm Springs SCE customers say they were without power for over 24 hours

“I’m a little banged up, I do take a blood thinner, but you know, people shouldn’t look like this just trying to get in and out of their apartment.”

Russ Bannon’s condo went dark after power was lost around 2 AM on Sunday morning. He scrambled to get his dog out of the heat and stayed with a friend to keep cool.

Power was in and out until this morning due to a failed underground cable, though heat may have put stress on the system, according to a spokesperson from Southern California Edison.

President of the board at the Biltmore Condominiums, Matthew Beaudoin says many of the residents in the complex are elderly.

“I found out that one of our homeowners on dialysis had to have the hospital called because he couldn’t breathe,” says Beaudoin.

Bannon says some of his neighbors rely on the elevator that wasn’t working during the outage.

“No system is 100% and that is…a mechanical reality of the system,” says Robert Villegas of Southern California Edison.

Beaudoin and Bannon agree reimbursements should be given to residents for spoiled food and hotel expenses during the outage. Residents are encouraged to file claims online.

Bannon says given the potential life or death stakes of the situation, he’s more interested in seeing a change made with SCE’s communication policies.

“Take action, take responsibility, change the communication system. If they had let the TV stations and the radio stations know…the general public would have known more about this,” says Bannon.

SCE did say there is a protocol in effect to go door to door to critical care customers during a long term outage, but that did not happen in this case.

SCE also says that automated alerts that customers can receive through emails, phone calls, and texts are the quickest way to stay updated on system failures and repairs, though it does appear in this case that not all of that information was necessarily consistent with what residents say was happening.