The outage two weeks ago was triggered when fires broke out in three underground vaults and damaged a power grid that proved extremely hard and tedious to fix.
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The power’s back on in Long Beach, two days after an electrical vault fire left thousands in the dark.
Southern California Edison spokeswoman Susan Cox said earlier that some customers might not have power back until sometime Friday.
Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia has said the outages have had a negative economic impact on the order of millions of dollars and wants the situation to be investigated by the state Public Utilities Commission.
Crews have started making repairs based on the inspections, according to the release.
The outage originated Thursday afternoon when a massive underground vault exploded.
All but four were inspected, according to Long Beach city officials. “However, there still aren’t any answers as to what the cause was for the original outage or this secondary outage”, Gerot said. Crews used generator power to temporarily restore electricity to the affected area.
“We’re at least certainly looking at going into tomorrow to make those final repairs to get that cable pulled – or get a new cable in the ground”, said Steve Conroy, an SCE spokesman.
About 150 technicians worked on repairs, and 10 generators provided power to 190 Edison customers, including businesses and residents, Saturday morning. As crews transition customers from the underground network system to the generators, residents will experience another outage that should last about 45 minutes.
However, the problem also stretched beyond Long Beach neighborhoods and onto surrounding freeways.
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Edison officials initially hoped to fully restore power to the area by Friday evening, but said Saturday it would not happen until the afternoon.
