Sure glad I have a generator that kicked in when the juice went
out. ;)

TMT


Outage affects 6 million in Calif., Ariz., Mexico
By JULIE WATSON - Associated Press | AP - 10 mins ago

SAN DIEGO (AP) — A major outage knocked out power in a region of
almost 6 million people in the Southwest and Mexico on Thursday,
bringing San Diego to a near-standstill and leaving people in the
surrounding desert to swelter in searing summer heat.

Two nuclear reactors were offline after losing electricity, but
officials said there was no danger to the public or workers.

San Diego bore the brunt of the blackout that started shortly before 4
p.m. PDT., darkening much of the nation's eighth-largest city was
darkened. All outgoing flights from San Diego's Lindbergh Field were
grounded and police stations were using generators to accept emergency
calls across the area.

The blackout extended east to Yuma, Ariz. where more than 56,000
people were left in the dark; power was restored there about five
hours later.

Pockets in California and south of the border in Baja California. But
most of the people in the darkened swath were expected to spend the
night without power.

"It feels like you're in an oven and you can't escape," said Rosa
Maria Gonzales, a spokeswoman with the Imperial Irrigation District in
California's sizzling eastern desert, where heat was well into the the
triple digits when the power went out for about 150,000 of its
customers.

After the sun went down, residents poured into darkened bars in
downtown San Diego, some donning reading lights on their heads like
miners. A pair of men carried flaming Tiki torches — usually planted
in backyards — to see their way down the pitch black street.

The U.S.-Mexico border was cloaked in darkness and police on both
sides sent in re-enforcements to prevent looting and other crime in
their cities, but none was reported.

A backup system allowed officials to continue operating crossings from
Arizona to California, said Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman
Jackie Wasiluk.

Power officials said the massive blackout was likely caused by an
employee removing a piece of monitoring equipment at a power
substation in southwest Arizona.

Residents in Yuma were among the first to regain power, along with
parts of Orange County. All 56,000 customers for Arizona Public
Service were back online around 9:30 p.m., according to Daniel
Froetscher, a vice president at APS.

Other cities in San Diego County were also reporting lights were
coming back late Thursday.

Mike Niggli, chief operating officer of San Diego Gas & Electric
Co.Niggli said it would be a "slow march" restoring service but most
would remain in the dark throughout the night. Some "small pockets"
out could be out until Saturday.

Tijuana, Mexicali and other cities in Mexico's Baja California state
are connected to the U.S. power grid, forcing them to lose power,
Niggli said.

San Diego officials announced schools and city trains would be closed
Friday as a precaution.

The power loss should have been limited to the Yuma and the power
company was investigating why it spread to such a large area,
including Mexico. Officials ruled out terrorism.

"This was not a deliberate act. The employee was just switching out a
piece of equipment that was problematic," Froetscher said.

In Tijuana, people wandered out of their hot homes into the street to
cool off while restaurants scrambled for ice to save perishable food.

In San Diego, the trolley system that shuttles thousands of commuters
every day was shut down and freeways were clogged at rush hour. Trains
were stopped in Los Angeles, an Amtrak spokesman said, because there
was no power to run the lights, gates, bells and traffic control
signals.

Police directed traffic at intersections where signals stopped
working.

Blake Albert Jordan, 20, saw a trolley come to a screeching halt as he
neared the platform. Dozens of passengers emptied onto the tracks when
the doors opened.

Jordan said he called about 20 friends and family to pick him up in
San Diego's Mission Valley, where he was visiting a friend, to his
home in suburban Lemon Grove. None offered to venture on the roads.

Officials were still trying to find the cause of the outage.

When a transmitter line between Arizona and California was disrupted,
it cut the flow of imported power into the most southern portion of
California, power officials said. The extreme heat in some areas also
may have caused some problems with the lines, Niggli said.

"Essentially we have two connections from the rest of the world: One
of from the north and one is to the east. Both connections are
severed," Niggli said.

Two reactors at the San Onofre nuclear power plant went offline at
3:38 p.m. as they are programmed to do when there is a disturbance in
the power grid, said Charles Coleman, a spokesman from Southern
California Edison. He said there was no danger to the public or to
workers there.

The outage came more than eight years after a more severe black out in
2003 darkened a large swath of the Northeast and Midwest. More than 50
million people were affected in that outage.

In 2001, California's failed experiment with energy deregulation was
widely blamed for six days of rolling blackouts that cut power to more
than 3 million customers and shut down refrigerators, ATMs and traffic
signals.

In Arizona, about half of Yuma County had power again Thursday evening
after losing it earlier. Yuma County has about 200,000 residents and a
little under half live in the city of Yuma.

_____

Associated Press Writers contributing to this report include Elliot
Spagat in San Diego; Gillian Flaccus in Orange County; Shaya Mohajer
and Greg Risling in Los Angeles; and Walter Berry and Paul Davenport
in Phoenix.