MAJOR UPDATED / New Timeline / Details: </font><font face="ARIAL,VERDANA,HELVETICA" size="4">SCE Says: (1) Re ELB Outage: 491 Customers Lost Power About Midnight (Found Damaged Underground Cable In Tfc Circle Area) And Workers Shut Down Wider Area (Approx. 19,000 Customers) To Do Repairs; Wider Area Restored Within A Half Hour, Original Outage Area Restored Shortly Before 4 a.m.; (2) Re Downtown Outage (Approx. 731 Customers), SCE Workers Were Working When Something Happened, Power Went Down About 8:30 a.m., Restored By About 9:41 a.m.

LBReport.com

News

MAJOR UPDATE / New Info: SCE Says: (1) ELB Outage: 491 Customers Lost Power About Midnight (SCE Found Damaged Underground Cable In Tfc Circle Area Vault), Then Workers Shut Down Wider Area (Approx. 19,000 Customers) About 1 a.m. To Do Repairs; Wider Area Restored Within A Half Hour, Original Outage Area Restored Shortly Before 4 a.m.; (2) Downtown Outage (Approx. 731 Customers), SCE Workers Were Working When Something Happened, Power Went Down About 8:30 a.m., Restored By About 9:41 a.m.

LBREPORT.com is reader and advertiser supported. Support independent news in LB similar to the way people support NPR and PBS stations. We're not non-profit so it's not tax deductible but $49.95 (less than an annual dollar a week) helps keep us online.

(Aug. 15, 2015, multiple updates, latest 1:40 p.m.) -- LBREPORT.com has learned via SCE spokesman Robert Villegas that the power outage that affected a wide area of East Long Beach overnight (reader reports indicate from roughly Cherry Ave. to Studebaker Rd. and from Spring St. to south of 7th St./roughly Colorado St.) began with a damaged underground cable in the Traffic Circle area [no word from SCE on how it became damaged] and then grew about an hour later to affect roughly 19,000 customers in the wider ELB area when SCE workers de-energized the wider area to perform repairs.

As previously reported by LBREPORT.com, another SCE spokesperson told us in the 7 a.m. hour that a total of 20,844 SCE customers were affected and the cause was a vault fire. (Caveat: An SCE "customer" is an SCE account, and a single SCE household account may consist of several family members...meaning 20,000+ customers could be two or three times that amount in actual people affecyed.)

The 1 a.m. hour repairs restored power at about 1:27 a.m. to the roughly 19,000 customers in the wider ELB area, but the roughly 491 customers originally darkened by the damaged underground cable at about midnight didn't have their power restored until shortly before 4 a.m.

This timeline is consistent with what LBREPORT.com readers have been telling us on Facebook and in emails for the past several hours...as residents in the Whaley Park area said their power was out for 2-3 hours (explained by the originating underground cable damage.)

[Scroll down for further.]

LBREPORT.com has been working this story since before dawn. At 7:10 a.m., an SCE spokeswoman confirmed the outage occurred from roughly 1:00 a.m.-1:27 a.m., affected 20,844 customers and the cause was a vault fire...and didn't have a cause.

LBREPORT.com pressed SCE spokesman Villegas on whether SCE could say at this point whether what precipitated the outages was or wasn't an intentional act. Mr. Villegas said he doesn't have that information and SCE's investigation is continuing. (LBREPORT.com notes that yesterday's (Aug. 14) high temp at LB Airport (Spring St./Lakewood Blvd. in ELB) reached 94 degrees, but there's no confirmation from SCE at this point that the vault fire was related to the heat/high usage.)

We further pressed Mr. Villegas on whether SCE could say at this point whether what precipitated the July 15 downtown and July 30 downtown-and-beyond outages were or weren't intentional acts...and Mr. Villegas reiterated that he doesn't have that information and SCE's investigation is continuing.

[Scroll down for further.]

We don't have confirmation from SCE of the exact geographic boundaries of this morning's ELB outage. LBREPORT.com readers report via Facebook and email that the affected areas included Studebaker/Stearns, 7th-15th/Redondo, PCH/Termino, 3rd-10th/Ximeno, Lakewood/Willow, Atherton/Clark-Studebaker, 7th/Raymond, Woodruff/Willow. A very credible reader turned out to be accurate in reporting that power was out for 2-3 hrs near Whaley Park (near CSULB). We now know that this was due to the originating outage.

A few hours later, an SCE outage affected about 735 customers in the downtown area (roughly between Pacific and Atlantic Aves. between Anaheim St. (in some areas 14th St.) to 3rd St.) SCE spokesman Villegas says SCE workers were working when for some reasons he didn't detail, a piece of equipment went down at about 8:30 a.m.; SCE restored power to the area by 9:41 a.m.

Scroll down for further

On July 15, a 54 hour SCE outage impacted roughly 4,000 of its customers (LBFD said 4,800 at its height; again: double or triple customers to estimate number of residents affected) in a densely populated portion of downtown Long Beach. That was followed a few days later by a smaller outage affecting Port areas. Then on July 30 in the 4 p.m. hour, an estimated SCE 30,000 customers (estimate: 60,000-90,000 residents in families) lost power in parts of downtown, the East Village, Wrigley (north to Willow St.) and across to WLB (Santa Fe. Ave)...with power restored to about 29,000 customers within about three hours.

The July 15 and July 30 outages included fires/explosions in some downtown underground vaults that sent some manhole covers flying; SCE said on August 1 that it had inspected nearly 300 underground vaults in downtown LB and also tethered manhole covers in the area.