UPDATE, FEB. 15, 9:17 P.M.: Southern California Edison repair crew members must have felt as if they were stuck in a Godfather 3 scene last night, for just when they thought they were out (in Lake Forest), they were back in (in Huntington Beach). Specifically, as power was near completely restored for 2,000 customers following an electrical vault explosion near Serrano Road and Ridge Route in Lake Forest, a second outage left more than 21,000 Surf City customers in the dark.
]
Edison officials blamed the 8 p.m. outage on a breaker failure within a substation they refer to as the nerve center for the local power grid. Power has since been restored to nearly all Huntington Beach customers, Edison reports.
ORIGINAL POST, FEB. 14, 2:51 P.M.: Southern California Edison crews have descended on Serrano Road and
Ridge Route in Lake Forest, where an electrical vault explosion has
knocked out power to 2,000 homes and two schools.
Power has been restored for some, but SCE officials at this hour are unsure when it will be back up for all.
It all started with a loud blast heard near El Toro High School around 11:30 a.m.. Smoke was later seen rising from the sidewalk.
As nearby streets were closed, crew members discovered an underground cable failed.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.