Tuesday's Blackout Was Second this Year

Though not as widespread as initially reported, last week's blackout covered a substantial swath of the northwestern portion of the city.

Southern California Edison representative Lauren Bartlett said the outage began last Tuesday at 8:09pm, affecting a total of 3,377 households or businesses. Of those, 2,165 customers had "flickering lights" and interrupted power for about 30 seconds, she said.

The area affected by the blackout was roughly three-fourths of a square mile and fell within the following boundaries: North of 1st Street, south of 31st Street, east of The Strand and west of Ardmore Avenue.

Service was restored in the affected area incrementally thoughout the evening, said Bartlett, adding that by 12:53am Wednesday, all of the remaining 1,212 customers had full service again.

Bartlett said the cause of the outage was "equipment failure" near the intersection of Manhattan Beach Blvd and Ardmore Avenue and that a cause had "not yet been determined."

However, a blown transformer was said to be the culprit in an initial company report to the mayor, who passed along the information at last Tuesday's City Council meeting.

Bartlett said the last major blackout in Manhattan Beach occurred at 1:46pm Monday, January 18, of this year. During that outage, 868 customers were affected. Service was restored more than nine hours later. That outage, according to Bartlett, was due to "wind blowing vegetation into the lines, causing a downed wire."

Bartlett said that it is the company's first priority "to restore service whenever lights go out for any of our customers" and that "there are no reports of additional repairs needed" for the equipment located near Manhattan Beach Blvd and Ardmore Avenue.