Southern California Edison customers in the Norwalk/Downey area who lost power due to a transformer failure on Christmas Eve are awakening Wednesday with their electricity restored.
The outage occurred sometime in the afternoon on Tuesday.
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"We understand having a power outage on a holiday is a hardship," SCE spokesman Jeff Monford told City News Service . "We continue to work to restore power to customers safely and as quickly as possible. This outage is a major priority for us."
According to SCE officials, a transformer failure caused the widespread outage but crews were able to re-route power from a SoCal Edison substation to get most impacted customers back online relatively quickly.
As of 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, SCE's online outage map indicated that as many as 24,000 customers were affected by the outage. As of 2:20 a.m. Wednesday, the online map showed there were no longer any reported outages in the Norwalk/Downey area.
As of 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, the online SoCal Edison map showed five outages affecting 183 customers in other areas.
Norwalk residents Diane and Craig Beckman told KNX News' Craig Fiegener their power went out at around 1:30 PM Tuesday, leaving the family to get creative for Christmas Eve dinner.
"We just made the best of it," Diane said. "I have lots of candle, and then we took the lanterns out from the trailer and set them out around the house."
Initially, SoCal Edison told them the power outage could last as long as two days. Fortunately, the power came back on at about 2:00 PM Christmas morning.
In Downey, people told KNX News the power outage only lasted about an hour.
Metro C (Green) Line trains were halted between the Norwalk and Willowbrook/Rosa Parks stations when the initial power issue began. Buses were brought in to shuttle passengers between the stations, but electrical service on the light rail line was restored and trains began running again just before 5 p.m. Tuesday, according to the transit agency.
There were also reports of traffic lights being out at multiple intersections. It was unclear exactly how far the outage spread, but there were reports of electricity being out in areas including Santa Fe Springs, Bellflower and South Gate.
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