San Diego: 1.4 million customers without electric power!
Welcome to the 19th century!
(Note added September 8, 2011: TV news tonight is saying that UP TO 5 MILLION PEOPLE are affected, and that the cause was one person working in a substation north of Yuma, Arizona. IMAGINE what a terrorist could do!)
Over 1.4 million customers lost electric power today during a blackout across San Diego! Power may not be restored until Friday, according to utility officials. San Diego Gas and Electric says that the origin of the outage appears to be in Arizona. The outage extends across Southern California and into Arizona and Baja California.
The loss of electric power led to a shutdown of TWO nuclear reactors at the San Onofre nuclear power plant. A spokesman for Southern California Edison, Gil Alexander, said a fluxation in power caused the reactors to shut down at 3:38 p.m. but that the overall plant continues to have power.
The city of San Diego set up its emergency operations center.
“Across San Diego, businesses are closed, traffic is snarled and the trolley system is down. San Diego International Airport was on backup generators.
There were reports that power was also out in southern Orange County, Imperial County, Tijuana, Arizona and Palm Springs.”
An update at 5:14 PM quoted San Diego Gas & Electric saying that BOTH of its power supplies were compromised. Lines from the north and from Arizona appear to have failed.
TV news reports that terrorism is NOT involved, but that 3 days of VERY high temperatures in the region may be a factor.
(Note added September 8, 2011, 8:50 PM Pacific: Officials have said that the Southern California blackout was caused when a 500-kilovolt high-voltage line from Arizona to California went out of service.)
(Note added September 10, 2011: Utility officials are trying to understand why the failure of a single series capacitor at a Yuma substation resulted in a power outage for 4 MILLION PEOPLE!)
(Note added September 14, 2011: We shall have to add this incident to the bulging file of examples in which the SUPREMELY OVERCONFIDENT folks who “run things” (and assure us that nothing could “possibly” go wrong 
) are FAR LESS COMPETENT than they claim to be. I’m sure that most of us have worked for folks like that.)
-Bill at
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