SCE Offers Zero Explanation For Blackouts In Gentle Rain, Other Than “Weather”
Written by 991KBU on October 26, 2021
Power seems to be on across all of Malibu this morning … a day after hundreds of people spend part of the day yesterday in the dark.
Last night’s scheduled Malibu city council meeting was cancelled due to the partial power outages … which were still affecting the Paradise Cove and Serra Estates areas at nightfall Monday.
The state law that allows the city council to meet on computers says that the entire city has to have access to the meeting … electronically.
And for most people … when the power goes out … so does the access to the public meeting.
The packed agenda of city business will be delayed eight days … because Edison could not keep the lights on in a gentle rain.
And it was a gentle rain that fell on Malibu.
Winds were not very gusty either.
So why did the lights go out???
Southern California Edison tells KBUU it was the weather … as if yesterday’s weather was extreme.
It was … in fact … at most … a gentle rain … and mild winds.
S C E has publicly admitted in the past … it has not been maintaining its power equipment to operate in an environment where repeated fog … and lack of regular rain … causes dirt to build up on overhead components.
Transformers in particular are susceptible to this.
When the accumulated weather grime gets wet … it shorts out … causing explosions and fires like we saw yesterday.
At one point yesterday … as the rain started to gently fall yesterday morning … local firefighters were dealing with four simultaneous pole explosions in the Malibu area.
This has been happening in recent years … Edison line workers have told KBUU that the trucks that formerly used to wash off insulators were cut back … in a maintenance funding cut.
In 2017 … Edison admitted at Malibu city hall that its withdrawal of washing its overhead equipment was a mistake.
And they put the washing trucks back on the road … at least temporarily.
We asked Edison about that yesterday … the best they could come up with was a bland and detail-free statement acknowledging that a storm hit the area.
All they would give us was a boilerplate … non-responsive statement … blaming the weather for the outages and warning people to not touch downed power lines.
That’s all.
No explanation why some Malibu customers … on the trouble-plagued Cuthbert Circuit near Paradise Cove and Point Dume … are blacked out at a rate that is 18 times worse than the SCE average.
No explanation why a gentle rain with light winds was enough to cause chaos like what we saw yesterday.
Edison’s own reliability statistics show that the average Malibu power customer was in the dark for 1,478 minutes during 2020, a cumulative set of electric failures that is seven times worse than the SCE average.
Malibu might be able to take some comfort that the average rate for the rest of Southern California is also deteriorating as well …
Over 10 years … the total length of outages in all of the Southern California Edison service area has gone up by 38 percent.
Edison officials gave KBUU News a four sentence statement yesterday … most of it … a reminder to stay away from downed power lines … call 911. Noted.
