Rain causes outages across Coachella Valley
Southern California Edison's (SCE) website is showing outages across Coachella Valley. A majority of them are in the Palm Springs area. SCE said the outages happened because of the stormy weather.
"Whether it's winter storms or monsoonal summer thunderstorms, you're gonna have some outages, whether it's foreign objects that flying the lines, or actual lightning striking our system. That's just going to happen," said SCE spokesperson David Song.
The website showed outages on Monday in the local SCE area as of 5:00 p.m. :
- 708 customers are still without power in Palm Springs
- In Palm Desert, over 900 customers remained shut off as of noon, mostly near Palm Desert High School, located in the area of Cook Street and Aztec Road
Update: As of Tuesday (07/27) morning all power has been restored related to rain damage outages.
You can view a map of more outages on the Edison website. Also, you can stay updated about outages by signing up for power outage alerts.
Edison said fixing power outages can take anywhere from 30 minutes to multiple hours. It depends on what the issue is.
Edison is advising those who come across a downed power line that is touching the water to steer clear.
A transformer explosion in Cathedral City has also closed down a neighborhood street as firefighters wait for repairs.
There is a road closure on Baristo Road and Avenida el Pueblo where the transformer exploded.
News Channel 3 arrived at the scene this morning where Cathedral City firefighters had closed the road down.
Bernardo Diaz, a local resident told News Channel 3 firefighters told him they couldn't do anything until Edison showed up. Diaz also said he was told Edison was busy with other calls this morning as well. Diaz said he saw the moment the transformer was on fire.
"I thought someone was welding out here because of the reflection and arcing. But then I look back there and there were the lines in what appeared to be arcing on fire," said Diaz
Palm Springs resident, Daniel Zepeda, had a power outage around 4 a.m. July 26.
"It caught me off guard because I was like I work tomorrow. I haven't worked. It's my first day of coming back to work and I was like I need to sleep," said Zepeda. "Well, now I can't sleep because it's too hot and my dog's barking. It's like it's 4 a.m. I didn't get enough sleep."
Another Palm Springs resident, Gillian McLean, said she's thankful it wasn't hotter outside or it could've been much worse for her. McLean's outage last from about 4 a.m. to 9 a.m.
"So we just ask people to be patient with us," said Song. "So our goal really is to manage expectations of our customers so they can make plans accordingly. And the best way to do that is to sign up for our outage alerts."
