Edison apologizes for outage

Hardest-hit Long Beach customers will get $100 credits.

Southern California Edison has apologized to its Long Beach customers and will credit $100 toward the bills of those hardest hit by an extended blackout last week that left some without power for days.

The outage started about 3 p.m. July 15 and affected about 11,000 customers before service was fully restored Sunday, the company’s president, Pedro Pizarro, told the Long Beach City Council at its meeting Tuesday night.

He apologized for the extent and duration of the outage and said that customers who were without power for more than 24 hours would receive a $100 credit on their next bill or the following one.

The blackout was the worst for Edison’s Long Beach customers since at least the 1950s, the company said.

Edison officials said the outage lasted so long for some because of the design of Long Beach’s electrical network. The city’s grid is made up of a loop of electrical lines with no central beginning or end, said Paul Grigaux, vice president of transmission substations and operations for Edison.

The concept, Grigaux said, is that if one line fails, customers shouldn’t notice an interruption because the network will keep power flowing through the other cables.

But it also means there’s no simple way to identify where a problem occurred, he said.

Repair crews had to use trial and error, switching lines on and off until they found failed or weak lines.

Many businesses closed during the outage, while some of the city’s most vulnerable residents had to rely on handouts of food, water, batteries and flashlights from the company and city.

The California Public Utilities Commission said it would investigate the outage and Edison’s response to it. The city of Long Beach and the utility are conducting their own inquiries.