School's In--School's Out!

(School is out today for Christine!  We got the call last night.  It only started Wednesday, haha! Luckily, we still had power, but only a few blocks south of us and all the way down to Mexico did not.  All through Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley and into Arizona didn't either.  It has been hotter than blazes too, and I can't imagine what the people effected by this did without air conditioning.  Meredith called me last night on her way home from her parent's house to tell me that the power was off there and as she drove past the high school said other than the school marquis everything there was pitch black.  Shortly after, we got the call from the district. Cancelled.  Shucky darn! Two days of school and a 3 day weekend....

It did make me think about emergency preparedness and a fuel source, candles, etc.  Fortunately the electricity is back on.  But what if they weren't able to fix it that fast or at all?

Here is a news article about the situation.

Look at the picture of the blackness along the ocean with the car lights snaking along on the 5 freeway!)

SAN DIEGO — Power companies in Southern California restored electricity to most customers by early Friday after a massive blackout on Thursday left about 5 million people in parts of California, Arizona and Mexico in the dark.

The outage — apparently caused by a mistake by a single worker — was just a tenth the size of the 2003 blackout that left about 50 million people without power in the eastern United States and Canada.

But it will surely rank as one of the biggest blackouts in recent history, certainly one of the biggest caused by human error.

Sempra Energy's San Diego Gas & Electric power company said it restored power to the 1.4 million households and businesses it supplies at 3:25 a.m. Western time Friday.

That was almost 12 hours after a major electric transmission system outage in western Arizona and the loss of a key connection with the 2,150-megawatt San Onofre nuclear power plant in California resulted in the most widespread power outage in the company's history, SDG&E said.

Mexico's electrical utility said Friday that the lights were on for 1.1 million customers, or 97 percent of those who lost power. Power was also restored to all 56,000 customers in Yuma, Ariz.

The area affected by the outage — southern Orange County, across California's inland deserts, as far east as Yuma and into Baja California in Mexico — is home to 6 million people, The Associated Press said.

 

Power grid still 'very fragile'San Onofre, which is operated by Edison International's Southern California Edison, shut on Thursday and remained out of service early Friday, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"Restoring power in the aftermath of the loss of the entire local grid serving San Diego and southern Orange counties was a monumental task," David Geier, SDG&E vice president of electric operations, said in a release.

"The restoration process, however, has left our local power grid very fragile and we are asking our customers to conserve electricity throughout the day Friday," Geier said.

SDG&E and the California ISO, which operates the power grid for much of the state, said they would focus on maintaining and ensuring the integrity of the local power system for the next few days before determining the sequence of events that led to the outage and establishing practices and procedures to ensure that outages such as the Sept. 8 event are not repeated.

"There appears to be two failures here — one is human failure and the other is a system failure. Both of those will be addressed," said Damon Gross, a spokesman for Pinnacle West Capital's Arizona utility Arizona Public Service.

       

While the restoration of power in San Diego signaled that the blackout was essentially over, the electrical system was deemed fragile and people were urged to go easy on air conditioning, while San Diego schools and beaches remained closed.

The outage occurred at 4 p.m. Thursday after an electrical worker removed a piece of monitoring equipment at a power substation in southwest Arizona, officials at Phoenix-based Arizona Public Service Co. said.

It was unclear why that mishap, which normally would have been isolated locally, sparked such a widespread outage. The company said that would be the focus of a probe.

The blackout also caused a 3.2-million sewage spill that closed miles of San Diego-area beaches.
All public schools in the city as well as state universities and community colleges were closed Friday.
During the night, all outgoing flights were grounded at San Diego's main airport, Lindbergh Field. The airfield was open and had power Friday morning but authorities said some airlines may have cancelled individual flights. Some San Diego freeway traffic was also affected during the outage.