Southern California utility crews and fire fighters braced for the return of Santa Ana winds and dry weather end of the week as they continued struggling to restore power and gas to many customers even as wildfires continued in some remote areas. The companies say they plan to assess the damage to their systems after the fires are extinguished and services are fully restored. “Disasters of this scale take a toll on all of us,” said Yakout Mansour, California Independent System Operator president. “Contingency plans were put to the ultimate test. And the good news is they worked.” There were no major outages due to transmission system shutdowns or failures because of conservation and careful management of the high-voltage grid, according to Mansour. Instead, outages stemmed from damage to utilities’ local distribution systems. However, the Southern California wildfires did force utilities to de-energize some major transmission pathways. As a result, at least for a brief time those shut downs caused the San Diego area to only narrowly skirt blackouts. By October 26, all major transmission lines had been restored to service throughout Southern California, according to the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “We came within a few minutes of rolling blackouts in San Diego,” California Public Utilities Commission president Mike Peevey said November 1. He noted that the Southwest Powerlink line was down for a few days, and the fire burned the line hooked into the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. “This reminds us of the frailty of the transmission lines in San Diego,” said Peevey, who urged the commission to consider fires in transmission planning and ensure that the same fire does not wind up burning multiple lines. “Southern California will have repeated fires,” he concluded. CPUC executive director Paul Clanon said that the commission will consider approving funding for Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric to help them deal with the fire-caused damage to their systems. Both of the investor-owned utilities said that they would perform full damage assessments in the weeks ahead. When the fires broke out on October 21, the Office of Emergency Services noted that the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station’s two reactors were shut down for maintenance. They were briefly restricted from going back online this week until the Federal Emergency Management Agency completed a “disaster-initiated review.” The purpose of the review was to determine whether surrounding communities in the midst of a disaster, such as the fires, would have the capacity to respond should a nuclear accident occur during reactor startup. The review revealed that nearby jurisdictions did have the capacity to respond to any nuclear problem should one arise, the office stated. On November 1, NRC reported that San Onofre unit 2 had started up, but that unit 3 remained offline. Utilities suffered substantial fire-related damage to their local distribution lines. Poles and transformers were destroyed and lines came down, causing scattered outages. San Diego Gas & Electric does not expect to fully restore services to 97 percent of its 1.3 million customers until November 4. Some 2,700 in seven communities are expected to remain without power until an unspecified date. Overall, 80,000 SDG&E customers lost power due to the fires. “We’re focusing our efforts on more than 30 local communities and, especially, on some of the most seriously impacted areas,” said Michael Niggli, SDG&E chief operating officer. The utility had 750 of its own employees and 500 mutual aid and contract workers laboring to replace or repair 1,000 poles and more than 35 miles of downed electric lines. In its effort to survey the damage, three of its employees went down in a helicopter crash October 25. However, the three, plus the pilot, walked away from the aircraft, which crashed into an avocado grove near Poway. Southern California Edison remained “very active” in the Lake Arrowhead area, where fires continued to burn and more than 1,600 customers remained without power early this week, said Paul Klein, company spokesperson. Fires raging in the mountainous area caused outages for 14,480 of the utility’s customers and damaged 235 poles, 34 transformers, and brought down 3.3 miles of power lines. The utility had 312 crews working in the area. Overall, 600,000 Edison customers experienced outages at various points during the fire storm, most of them only briefly, according to the CPUC. The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power avoided the brunt of the fires. It suffered smoke damage to some transmission lines, but after washing them down they operated normally except for one extra line not regularly relied on to move power, said Carol Tucker, department spokesperson. On November 1, 23 fires that raged across seven Southern California counties had caused seven deaths, 124 injuries, and burned 518,021 acres, according to the Office of Emergency Services. They had destroyed 2,180 residences and five businesses and damaged another 428 residences and nine businesses. Most of the blazes had been fully contained or extinguished.
