The Redondo Beach City Council confronted Southern California Edison regarding a recent power failure and made an effort to figure out just what SCE plans to do with the transmission lines that stretch to the AES Redondo generating plant — only to be rebuffed by SCE’s spokespeople.
It was a coincidence that SCE regional manager Ray Pok was in the Council chambers on a Tuesday evening following a power failure that affected more than 200 residents over the weekend — it just so happened that a presentation by Pok, concerning the reliability of SCE’s electrical grid, was agendized following Pok’s recent installation to his position overseeing the South Bay.
While Pok’s presentation, which focused largely on positive developments for Redondo Beach and the South Bay at large (Redondo outages have trended downward in recent years, according to Pok), the council’s focus laid elsewhere. Namely, their concerns were with the weekend’s outage, planned outages, issues with street lights and, of course, the transmission lines that run along 190th Street.
SCE chose to punt in regards to the transmission lines, as SCE district manager Jeff Kennedy deferred questions regarding the lines to a “whole group related to that,” that he doesn’t manage, and who were not in attendance that evening. Mayor Steve Aspel mentioned, in regards to the power lines, that he and District 2 Councilman Bill Brand were working to put together a citizens’ group to discuss the lines, and that more information on that would be forthcoming — and that while Edison isn’t require to attend, the city is extending the invitation.
Aspel’s first concern with the evening, however, was in regards to the effects of planned outages, hoping to broker some sort of agreement that the city would be able to be notified by SCE when power is going to go down in an area. He related a story that a planned maintenance outage along Catalina Avenue, just before Christmas, was set to take place during business hours. In an effort to get the timing of the outage changed, Aspel called SCE, where he was told that “SCE couldn’t postpone the outage, because they didn’t want to pay the overtime,” he said. Eventually, he said, the company relented, “but it took a lot of phone calls.”
“I know you’re trying to stay ahead of problems,” he said, “but let us know about planned outages so we can be proactive, rather than reactive,” noting that council members would be happy to give their citizens a warning of any forthcoming outages.
Pok, in response to Aspel, did note that SCE does have systems in place to notify customers of outages, through the company’s mobile app and website.
Discussion then shifted toward emergency outages, as District 3 Councilman Pat Aust mused about Edison’s worsening response times since he began his time with the city, “watching it get progressively worse and worse,” before being told by Pok and Kennedy that Edison’s response times currently are between 45 minutes and 2 hours, depending on how many crews are in the area at the time.
Brand then confronted the company regarding Sunday’s outage, saying that, as someone who has traveled and worked in third world countries, SCE’s power failures are starting to feel familiar.
Kennedy’s response was that the company still doesn’t know exactly what caused the issue, and that it was too soon to tell. “Something wasn’t right,” he said. “Maybe the jumpers were too long, maybe something fell off of a pole and caused them to connect — there’s a lot of different factors, and no clues to find out what the root cause was.”
At the end of the meeting, City Manager Joe Hoefgen made a point to state that SCE was notified of what the Council would be asking them “and that we asked them to be prepared to discuss those issues” — including discussion of the possible removal of Edison’s transmission lines within the city.
“So they willfully evaded those issues?” Aust asked.
“We’ll invite them back,” Aspel said. “I think they might’ve got the message.”
