SCE Releases Long Beach Outage Investigation Reports
18 November 2015 - 11:48AM
Business Wire
Utility shares findings with state regulator
and Long Beach city officials and commits to making improvements in
the system
Southern California Edison today released internal and
independent investigative reports on the causes of two power
outages that affected the downtown Long Beach electrical network
last July. The incidents disrupted service to customers in the area
for several days.
SCE shared the findings of its internal investigation as well as
the results of an independent investigation by Davies Consulting
LLC with the California Public Utilities Commission and the city of
Long Beach.
The two reports, while differing in scope and methodology, agree
that the cause of the first outage on July 15 was the failure of
several critical components in the underground network to perform
their network protection functions due to improper operation and
insufficient management oversight of the system.
“We are deeply disappointed that the findings point to
shortcomings in SCE’s operation of the network,” said Pete
Dietrich, SCE senior vice president for Transmission and
Distribution. “However, we are encouraged that the investigations
have identified issues that are correctable, that we will learn
from and that can help us improve the way we manage the network to
provide the kind of service to our customers that they should
expect from us.”
The reports identified the failure of an underground cable
splice as the event that triggered the July 15 outage. The Long
Beach underground network was designed to withstand the failure of
a single component, however, the cable splice failure led to a
cascading series of failures due to non-functioning network
protection devices, resulting in the entire downtown network being
taken offline for inspection and repairs.
Both reports also found that damage sustained during the first
outage led to the second outage on July 30.
SCE’s internal report outlined numerous steps the company is
taking to correct these issues and prevent future incidents. The
company has already taken some corrective actions on the system,
including complete and thorough inspections of every underground
vault on the downtown network system and additional and ongoing
inspections on other parts of the grid in Long Beach.
For additional information on the findings and links to the
relevant documents, please visit the SCE newsroom for more
information and to access the reports.
SCE Findings — Davies Report
About Southern California Edison
An Edison International (NYSE:EIX) company, Southern California
Edison is one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, serving a
population of nearly 14 million via 5 million customer accounts in
a 50,000-square-mile service area within Central, Coastal and
Southern California.
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Media Contact:Southern California EdisonDavid Song,
626-302-2255
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