LADWP crews have been working 24/7 to restore power lost to customers around the city during the weekend’s excessive heat. According to LADWP, the intense heat storm and resulting high electricity use triggered more than 200 small neighborhood outages, as distribution equipment overheated and overloaded, causing some equipment to fail. Local distribution stations also overheated, leading to larger circuit outages affecting multiple neighborhoods.
As of 9 p.m. Tuesday evening, LADWP crews had restored power to 77,000 LADWP customers since the extreme temperatures began on Saturday, September 5th. An estimated 2,400 customers in Koreatown and 5,100 customers in Mid-Wilshire were affected.
One of those customers was Windsor Square resident Ron Reyes, who told the Buzz his power went out on Saturday. When we spoke to Reyes on Tuesday afternoon, hesaid there was some power coming into his home in a random selection of power outlets, but none of his major appliances or AC were working. He said several neighbors reported a similar situation. Reyes said he even had to send his children to a friend’s house so they could log into the internet for their school classes.
Tuesday afternoon, LADWP spokesman Christina Holland told us the outrage reported for Windsor Square had been assigned to repair crews, but she couldn’t elaborate on when the power would be restored. According to LADWP’s outage map, 36 residents were without power near Reyes in Windsor Square, with some 22 residents affected in another outage in Larchmont Village.
But fortunately, late yesterday evening Reyes reported seeing crews working on the transformer near his home and shortly thereafter power was restored.
“We are happy to have power restored after 3 1/2 hot days and nights. We can get back to the new COVID19 normal with the kids back on Zoom schooling,” Reyes messaged the Buzz yesterday evening. “We hope that DWP can make the urgently needed improvements to prevent this from happening again in the future. P. S. we also have internet service again.”
Reyes further explained that his home apparently lost one of the three legs that supply power to the house.
“Today’s intense and unrelenting heat hit our power distribution hard in many neighborhoods in the City, causing equipment, stations and circuits to overload,” said Andrew Kendall, Sr. Assistant General Manager, Power System Distribution in a LADWP news post. “We’ve had all of our resources focused on restoring power as quickly as possible and have made significant progress, while also keeping our crews safe as they work in extreme temperatures. We’ll continue to make significant progress overnight, but we also want to let customers know that it will take time to restore everyone so they can plan accordingly,” Kendall added.
LADWP encourages residents to set AC units to 78 degrees or higher to ease demand on neighborhood power grids.
