San Diego: Electricity was restored in San Diego early yesterday after utility crews worked around-the-clock to make emergency repairs following an outage accidentally triggered by a utility worker that darkened a swath of California, Arizona and Mexico and paralysed the nation's eighth-largest city.
The restoration of power in San Diego signalled that the blackout was essentially over, with electricity back to almost everyone affected by the outage, though the electrical system was deemed fragile and people were urged to go easy on air conditioning, while San Diego schools and beaches remained closed.
According to tallies provided by officials, power was also restored to 180,000 customers in Mexico and 56,000 in Yuma, but it was unclear clear how many other customers were still without electricity.
The San Diego area was hit especially hard with power severed about 4pm on Thursday to all of San Diego Gas & Electric Co.'s 1.4 million household and business customers, the company said, leaving residents sweltering without air conditioners and paralysing some San Diego freeway and airport traffic.
The outage extended into southern Orange County, across California's inland deserts, as far east as Yuma and into Mexico, where officials said power was out in northern Baja California's two biggest cities, home to roughly 2.5 million people. The entire region is home to some 6 million people, though it was impossible to say exactly how many had lost power.
The outage occurred after an electrical worker removed a piece of monitoring equipment at a power substation in southwest Arizona, officials at Phoenix-based Arizona Public Service said. It was unclear why that mishap sparked such a widespread outage.
