Dry Winds To 30 MPH And Heat This Week – Edison Can’t Explain Last Outage – But They Plan To Wash The Power Poles
Written by 991KBU on October 12, 2020
Some mild desert winds … and heat .. are on tap for the Malibu this week.
But to call this a Santa Ana is to way overstate what is coming … starting tomorrow and lasting thru Friday.
peak winds over the mountains today will be around 30 miles per hour … up in the hills.
It will be very dry … and hot.
Highs today in the mountains will be around 96 … 100 tomorrow,.
The fuel moisture level in the brush in the mountains is now below 60 percent … bring the fire danger into the critical area.
There are no scheduled power outages … however.
Southern California Edison officials say they cannot determine what went wrong … when the power to nearly 2 thousand customer accounts blacked out eight nights ago.
It was a foggy night … and the circuits that serve Malib from Point Dume west went dark.
There was heavy fog observed when the lights went out at 825 Saturday night.
there were wires reported down on Cliffside … on Point Dume.
others reported seeing an explosion on P C H near Zuma Creek.
Nearly a week after the outage … power company officials tell KBUU that they could not find where the system malfunctioned.
Patrol crews surveying the overhead power liens could not find any damage,
Sections were tested … no short circuits were detected … and power was switched back on.
Sparks that were seen in some locations may have been fuses … mounted on poles … that are designed to blow out when an unsafe power surge occurs.
Either one of those could have been the cause … or one result … of a short circuit somewhen in western Malibu.
Where???
The engineers do not know.
The Edison company has a real problem keeping their system functioning in malibu in fog.
Edison has admitted it has had maintenance problems with its overhead poles in Malibu.
the beach weather causes crud to build up on insulators … and when fog makes that crud wet … it causes power to actually flow from the wires into the wooden poles or onto transformers.
Power companies all around the world deal with this by washing insulators off with sprays of water … but Edison stopped doing that.
The power company does say it is going to send its trucks out again … the ones with a tank and a big pressure washer at the end of an arm.
The tops of the poles are going to get washed off again.
