Day 14: Power Back To Western Malibu in 6 Days, SCE Says
Written by 991KBU on November 23, 2018
The fire hit two weeks ago today.
And the Southern California Edison Company has just let it be known that electric service in parts of western Malibu may not be restored for one more week.
Thursday … November 29th … at 3 p m … to be exact.
That’s the word given to the Santa Monica Malibu School District … which needs electricity for about two weeks of cleanup and hazmat testing at Malibu high school and one Cabrillo elementary school.
As of late yesterday afternoon … 2 thousand 48 electric accounts in western Malibu remained blacked out … on day 13 from the fire.
Power has been restored to 42 hundred 89 customers.
The Malibu Park neighborhood around the high school remains an epicenter of problems …. with more than half of the homes destroyed … and the power system taken down along with them.
Malibu West has had power restored to its underground lines … about 70 customers back on line … as portable generators have been up for a week now.
But next door … the 35 homes in the Seastar and Surfside neighborhood are without power from their underground lines.
LATE UPDATE: THE GENERATOR GUY FOR SEASTAR / SURFSIDE SHOWED UP THIS MORNING.
Western Malibu is served by only one set of transmission lines … the power lines that bring electricity into the area.
It arrives via a stub line that branches off from transmission towers above Escondido Canyon and crosses the foothills above Ramirez Canyon … Kanan Dume Road … and then heads down to the Point Dume area.
That line … as of sunrise this morning … was still laying on the ground in Escondido Canyon …. where it used to cross high in the air.
Some areas of Point Dume have had power restored … they are getting juice from tie ins to circuits to the east …
But that is insufficient to connect all of western Malibu.
With the school district being told November 29th is the estimated restoration date for power … it appears that it will take another six days for that transmission line to be restored.
Another 600 plus houses are out of power in the Santa Monica Mountains … north of Malibu.
Across the S C E system …27 hundred customer accounts are still blacked out … nearly all of them in the Malibu area.
As for the school district … they had been counting on getting back their electricity by yesterday … Thursday.
Late in the day they were informed it will take another weekTo get Southern California Edison power back on.
School facility manager Carey Upton says the campus wiring is not set up for emergency generators … and it will take some time to ready connections … if they decide generators are practicable.
It is possible that the cleanup crews can begin using small portable generators.
His team is consulting with generator experts and Edison officials to determine the best course of action.
