Blackout hits up to 5 million
SAN DIEGO – A major power outage knocked out electricity to up to 5 million people in California, Arizona and Mexico on Thursday, bringing San Diego and Tijuana to a standstill and leaving people sweltering in the late-summer heat in the surrounding desert.
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.; most 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.
Parts of Orange County regained power Thursday evening, but officials said most people would remain in the dark through the night.
The outage was likely caused by an employee removing a piece of monitoring equipment that was causing problems at a power substation in southwest Arizona, officials said. The power loss should have been limited to the Yuma, Ariz., area. The power company, Arizona Public Service, was investigating why the outage wasn’t contained.
“This was not a deliberate act. The employee was just switching out a piece of equipment that was problematic,” said Dan Froetscher, a vice president at APS.
Homes and businesses were darkened from southern parts of Orange County to San Diego to Yuma. It also affected cities south of the border across much of the state of northern Baja. Border officials said crossings into California were open.
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, said Mike Niggli, chief operating officer of San Diego Gas & Electric Co.
“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.