Dive Summary:
- As of Monday, crews have restored power to a great chunk of the 145,000 Pacific Gas and Electric Co (PG&E). customers affected by a Sunday blackout covering a large part of California’s Central Coast.
- According to a PG&E tweet, the power outage was caused by equipment failure at a substation, and the city of Santa Maria, with roughly 100,000 residents, was the largest city affected.
- The outage forced the police department to switch to generator power, and send out an extra fleet of officers amidst reports of vandalism at local stores. In addition, a hospital had to cancel a surgery.
From the article:
“At first we thought it was a brown out, with half of the city lights out about 9:15 p.m.,” the city’s police Chief Ralph Martin said. “But 10, 15 minutes later the whole city was without power.”
Martin said the outage forced the police department to switch to generator power.