Electricity During the Fire, Now Third Outage in Two Weeks

Electricity remained on during the Palisades Fire.

A majority of Pacific Palisades residences had electricity  during the Palisades Fire, which  possibly contributed to the start of additional fires.

Now, residents of Lower Huntington Palisades, Santa Monica and Rustic Canyons, are  suffering their third power outage in two weeks. The first occurred on July 31, it was followed by an outage  on August 5 and now August 11-12.

Doug Suisman, the President of The Canyon Alliance wrote in an August 11 letter to DWP “The current spate of blackouts and brownouts in Rustic and Santa Monica Canyons with two of them lasting 12 and 15 hours respectively, with the current one still ongoing – is causing economic harm to our businesses, putting elderly people on medication at risk, and creating unsafe conditions in the event of an emergency.

“I can tell you that our community of more than 2,000 residents and more than 100 commercial and home businesses is very frustrated by the outages and outraged by the lack of helpful communication from LADWP,” Suisman said in a statement he also mailed to councilmember Traci Park’s office.

“Using outdated forums like NextDoor and asking customers without power, internet or cell service, to call in with cellphones or log on to the LADWP website is not only ineffective but irresponsible,” Suisman said. “Today’s belated posting by LADWP on NextDoor, a full ten hours after the outage began, was not only useless (it contained no information the community was not already well aware of) but contained the misinformation that the outage began last night at midnight – it began between 9:15 and 9:45 p.m.”

CTN reached out to LADWP on August 12 about the cause of the outages.

DWP spokesperson Christina Holland replied late afternoon that  “Crews report that as of 3:35 p.m., all power has been restored to those affected by the overnight outage in the Pacific Palisades. We appreciate your patience and understanding while we worked to complete this complicated repair. If you haven’t already, you can sign up for outage alerts at www.ladwp.com/outage. She added, “I don’t have any information about the cause of the outage at the moment.”