For the past four summers, Southern California Edison has been sending out scheduled maintenance outage notifications to customers like Saugus resident John Eubank, alerting them that the utility would be shutting off power to their neighborhood.
Eubank, who lives in a neighborhood close to Central Park, says this summer his neighborhood has been experiencing more power shutoffs than before – and it’s making it more challenging to cope with the heat waves.
“Now this particular summer, it’s going to be a lot more intense. There’s an outage scheduled for Wednesday this week, and then there’s Tuesday and Wednesday next week,” said Eubank.
In the notification that gets sent out to customers, Edison includes a time frame of when the power is scheduled to be off. The maintenance outages usually are scheduled between early morning and late afternoon, Eubank said. Occasionally, they have a shutoff scheduled at night.
“If we weren’t having triple-digit heat, it wouldn’t be nearly as impactful,” Eubank said.
Eubank describes his neighborhood homes to be older and says the insulation is not the best. When the power is shut off and he cannot turn on a fan, the house starts to heat up very quickly and it becomes a worry when the children are home, he said. He felt that it would be more optimal for people if the maintenance outages were scheduled during cooler seasons.
Eubank has made several attempts to call Edison about the situation and found it difficult to deal with the automated response system rather than a person. When he finally got through to a representative, they explained their reasoning to him.
“He was saying that because of the power usage during the summer, they feel it’s better to do it during the summer because it lessens the draw on the grid,” said Eubank.
Edison officials say that delayed outages can cause aging equipment to fail and then they must do a repair outage, which can take much longer than a scheduled maintenance outage.
With scheduled maintenance outages, crews know exactly what to update and are prepped for it so that the outage does not last as long, according to Edison.
“To minimize the impacts, outages are capped at five hours when temperatures reach 105 degrees. The outage is canceled when temperatures reach 113 degrees. Some outages are scheduled at night, as well. But that means more people are home, so what seems like a better option for some, can be a challenge for others,” according to an article posted on Edison’s website.
For the customers who are medically affected by the outages, the company says it offers a “critical care backup battery program.” The battery is free and able to power medical devices when there is a power outage.
Edison’s other mitigation efforts include re-routing power to minimize the number of customers impacted, bundling maintenance jobs into one to limit the possibility of having to revisit an area, and considering rescheduling on a case-by-case basis.
