Third power outage in two months affects thousands in Long Beach

Almost 19,500 Southern California Edison customers in Long Beach were left without electricity early Saturday morning after an underground cable failed, the utility reported.

Robert Villegas, an Edison spokesman, said the outage occurred shortly after midnight and initially knocked out power to 491 homes and business in an area around Lakewood Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway.

He added that service was interrupted for another 19,000 customers when power was shut off to allow crews to make repairs.

Villegas said electricity was restored to the 19,000 homes and business by 1:27 a.m. and to the original 491 users by 4 a.m. The cause of the cable failure is under investigation.

Villegas said Saturday morning’s outage was unrelated to two other losses of power that affected about 35,000 Edison customers in downtown Long Beach last month.

On July 15, fires in an underground electrical vault knocked out electricity for about 5,000 homes and businesses. It took about four days to fully restore power.

Two weeks later, an underground electrical vault exploded, cutting off electricity to a total of about 30,000 customers over a period of several days.

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FOR THE RECORD

Aug. 17, 5:30 p.m.: An earlier version of this article said that 30,000 customers were without electricity for several days. A total of 30,000 customers were affected over several days, but all were not without power for the entire period.