California utility weighs more power shutoffs as Santa Ana winds resurge
Image: Aidon
Just two weeks after strong Santa Ana winds breathed life into wildfires in southern California, an expected resurgence in high wind conditions has led Southern California Edison (SCE) to consider enacting more Public Safety Power Shutoffs.
The utility announced this could impact more than 170,000 customers.
SCE meteorologists expected PSPS conditions to start Monday morning and anticipate they will be sustained through at least early Wednesday morning and possibly extend into later in the week.
About 172,697 customers are under consideration for PSPS in Kern, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura Counties, which the utility noted is a “much smaller number” than during the most recent windstorms. Near the start of the last windstorm, SCE said it had initiated a PSPS for 136,000 of its customers in several counties and said it was considering it for 427,208 more.
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“We know these PSPS outages are a hardship for our customers, and we have done a lot of work on our system to reduce the number of customers we have had to shut off in these events,” said SCE incident commander Anthony Edeson. “We only turn off power when absolutely necessary to protect our communities.”
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) continues to work to restore power to the roughly 9,500 customers who are still without power, who are located in or adjacent to fire-damaged areas that LADWP crews cannot safely access or in areas where it is unsafe to re-energise power lines.
Additionally, LADWP said it is on standby, ready to respond to any weather-related power outages due to the current red flag conditions.
Lawsuits emerge after the blaze
(SCE) is now the subject (and defendant) of at least four lawsuits alleging that the utility is responsible for at least one of the fires that raged across southern California. The lawsuits were filed by homeowners and renters who lost their homes in the Eaton fire, ABC News reports, and they allege that SCE did not properly de-energise enough electrical equipment, even in the face of red flag warnings from the National Weather Service.
“Despite knowing of an extreme fire risk, Defendants deliberately prioritised profits over safety. This recklessness and conscious disregard for human safety was a substantial factor in bringing about the Eaton Fire,” one of the complaints reads.
Local officials, including the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), are still investigating the causes of the wildfires that picked up speed last week in the face of heavy Santa Ana winds.
However, one lawsuit filed on behalf of several homeowners alleges that the Eaton fire started when SCE’s equipment created an “electrical arcing event which sent a shower of sparks and molten metal down to the ground into a receptive fuel bed.”
The plaintiffs in several lawsuits included supposed evidence of SCE’s liability for the Eaton fire, including statements and photos allegedly showing a fire starting near the base of SCE’s transmission towers, and satellite photos that purport to show the fire’s origin area near SCE’s overhead circuit lines, ABC News reports. SCE had previously confirmed in a press release that the Eaton fire began in its service area.
Pedro Pizarro, president and CEO of SCE’s parent company Edison International, appeared on “Good Morning America” the week after the fires began, and said the company did not yet have any indications that its equipment was involved in starting the fires.
“Typically, when there’s a spark created by equipment, you will see that kind of electrical anomaly. We haven’t seen that,” Pizarro said.
SCE filed two Electric Safety Incident Reports (ESIR) related to the wildfires, one for the Eaton Fire and another for the Hurst Fire. ESIRs are filed with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for incidents that meet certain criteria, such as significant media attention or a governmental investigation.
Originally published by Sean Wolfe on power-grid.com
