Residents seek answers from SCE after 5 outages in less than three weeks

It's been one outage after another for one Palm Springs neighborhood. Some of the residents are seeking answers from Southern California Edison after experiencing five power outages within the past three weeks.  

Palm Springs resident SCE customer Marvin Grossman lives in the neighborhood off of East Vista Chino near North Gene Autry Trail. He has reached out to SCE regarding the outages.

"I have lived here seven years. I've never seen such a degraded level of service for electric power as I've experienced," said Grossman. "You're left at their mercy to figure out when is the power going to be back on."

Dates of power outages:

• June 4
• June 8
• June 12
• June 16
• June 21

Some of the power outages lasted for nearly four hours. Grossman has a medical condition that puts him at risk if it's too hot, so using the air conditioning to stay cool is critical. 

"When the power goes off, it's very hard for me to breathe when it gets too hot," said Grossman. "Because it's unannounced, I can't open the garage door and get in my car. I have dogs. [I can't] go to a cooling center."

SCE upgraded the power equipment in the neighborhood last month. SCE said it does not know how many total residents have been affected by the recent outages. 

"There could still be points of failure down the line somewhere with the new equipment being there. It may not be the new equipment, but kind of the equipment around that area where the old and the new meet, there could be some issues," said SCE spokesperson David Song.

The official cause of the power outages is still being investigated by SCE.

"We do try to notify the customers as they are going through the outage to at least give them the estimated time for restoration," said Song.

Dale Panchesin lives across the street from Grossman and is facing the same outages. 

"I've lived other places and I've never had power outages like that," said Panchesin. "I got in my electric car and got air conditioning. I couldn't stand it anymore."

SCE said no other customers apart from Grossman have reached out in regards to the power outages in that area. 

"In terms of with this situation, when a customer does reach out to us, or other agencies, there might be an acceleration of that review, but it wouldn't go unnoticed," said Song.

As SCE investigates, residents said they’re worried outages will keep happening.

"There's a lot of senior people here and many are disabled and it's not fair," said Grossman. "We should have been told what's going on."

For tips on what to do during an outage, visit: https://www.sce.com/outage-center/preparing-for-outages