Montecito & Santa Barbara See Power Restored

Thursday and Friday ended up being days of power outages across Santa Barbara and the south coast, with more than 20,000 people blacked out on Thursday, and another 2,600 affected on Friday.

The Thursday outage affected much of Santa Barbara and Montecito. The Friday outage was first reported in the morning, with the Southern California Edison website reporting 2,648 customers affected. All power was restored by midafternoon, a relief for those sweltering in heat reaching the high 90’s.

The blackout Thursday affected large parts of Santa Barbara including downtown, the Mesa, the East Side and Montecito.

The outage started around 5:30 p.m. Thursday and at the height affected more than 19,500 customers, according to information from the Southern California Edison website. By 8:10 p.m., the number was reduced to 1,186 and others reported power restored before 9:00 p.m.

An advisory sent at 8:00 p.m. Thursday from the Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency Management showed some areas affected included Anacapa Street, Carrillo Street, Victoria Street, Arroyo Burro Beach and Cliff Drive.

Noozhawk reported the outage was caused by trouble at a substation at Edison and Gutierrez in Santa Barbara, quoting SCE spokeswoman Rondi Guthrie. “It’s a big outage. A substation bank went out, came back on, and went out again,” she said.

The outage caused several issues across Santa Barbara including the evacuation of an estimated 1,000 people attending a Tony Bennett concert at the Granada Theatre downtown. Santa Barbara city fire trucks were used to light up State Street to assist in the later stages of the evacuation as the sun went down. Fire crews also spent time rescuing people from elevators stalled by the outage.

Santa Barbara City College is located on the Mesa and was affected by the outage. Classes and other events were cancelled Thursday night.

The utility’s website with information on the outage can be located here: http://tinyurl.com/mwaf94u