Josh DuBose and Shelby Nelson
More than 900 Southern California Edison customers in the Inland Empire were forced to endure a power outage that lasted nearly 30 hours amid an oppressive heatwave bringing triple-digit temperatures to the area.
Nate Chripczuk is back inside his San Bernardino home now, but the piano instructor said staying inside his house during the outage wasn’t possible, forcing him to cancel his classes.
“I had to cancel them because I had no power. It was too hot,” he told KTLA.
The outage started at around 3:30 p.m. Sunday.
“The heat from the day was so bad here in the house that we couldn’t bear it,” Chripczuk added. “We had to stay in the car until 2:45 or something in the morning until we thought it was kind of cool enough.”
It was a challenge for the piano instructor to keep his pets cool and take care of his mother, who can’t be in the heat for too long due to underlying health issues. The power wasn’t restored until Monday night at around 8:30 p.m. While Chripczuk and his mother dealt with the high temps without any air conditioning, they said they couldn’t get any answers from SoCal Edison.
“This was an especially long and a real hardship outage for customers and we really realize that,” SoCal Edison representative Jeff Monford told KTLA. “The crews did work as fast as they could to bring the power back on, especially with the heat in mind.”
Monford said the reason for the outage was an equipment failure inside one of the utility’s substations. It’s unclear if heat was a factor in causing the equipment failure, but it was a large enough outage to leave roughly 930 Inland Empire customers in the dark and without air conditioning.
In the meantime, SoCal Edison says it has scheduled outages planned for thousands of customers in the coming days so that crews can perform maintenance.
“We know that people need their power now more than ever. During the heat is the worst time to have an outage,” Monford said. “Even so, we have to maintain the grid year-round. That work cannot stop or incidents like this could possibly happen more often. We have maintenance outages where we plan very carefully to work to replace aging or vulnerable equipment on the grid.”
Chripczuk and many of his neighbors are hoping they don’t have to endure a similar outage again.
“People’s lives can be in danger,” he said. “This heat is no joke.”
Customers are generally notified ahead of scheduled power outages.
Read More:SoCal Edison customers endure heatwave amid power outage
2023-07-19 01:30:43
