Business owner reacts to Southern California Edison’s project to prevent outages

Two years ago, Downtown Santa Barbara residents and businesses were hit with several outages.

Matt Wallace of 33 Jewels at El Paseo remembers the outages vividly.

“We had a lot of clients come in here.. visitors from out of town asking what’s going on around here? Is it like a third world country where the power goes off part of the day and comes back on later?” said Matt Wallace.

Wallace says his jewelry shop requires electricity to make phone calls, take payment from customers and protect his products through a security system.

“It was not a good representation of Santa Barbara,” said Wallace.

Southern California Edison unveiled the Downtown Santa Barbara Reliability Project at an open house at the Carrillo Recreation Center on Wednesday.

The 4 year project will be divided into three phases. The first one is expected to begin next week on Chapala Street.

The goal is to make the power grid more reliable and efficient. This news is encouraging to Wallace.

“I saw them working a lot in the downtown area in the vaults. They did a lot of work. I think they were pretty true to their word about addressing it,” said Wallace.

To learn more about the project, visit Southern California Edison’s site.