Heat Wave Outages: Over 20,000 Still Without Power In Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES, CA — Thousands of Los Angeles county residents are still without power following a record-breaking heat wave for the region. At least 45,000 Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers didn't have power on Monday, and as of 8 a.m. Tuesday that number still hovered around 11,000.

Some households are expected to be offline until Wednesday according to the company. On Saturday, LADWP revealed nearly 150,000 customers had been knocked off the power grid since the heatwave started on Friday.

Southern California Edison reported that around 9,800 customers were still without power as of Tuesday morning. Due to fire conditions, the company announced that over 66,000 customers could face Public Safety Power Shutoffs, a tool used to help prevent wildfire sparks.

More than 8,500 of these customers are in Los Angeles County and almost 6,500 live in Orange County.

"When forecasts indicate elevated weather conditions, we’ll begin assessing the potential impact to affected areas," Edison said on its website. We’ll analyze historical data to help predict the likelihood of a wildfire occurring, closely monitor weather watch alerts from the National Weather Service (NWS), and place incident responders on alert, if needed."

LADWP stressed that the hyperlocal nature of many current outages makes it tougher to restore power.

"Restoring neighborhood outages affecting groups of 5-20 homes takes our crews much longer than larger circuit level or partial circuit outages where a single crew may be able to restore power to 500 to 1000+ customers in the same amount of time," a statement said. "In contrast, neighborhood outages typically take a single crew 4-6 hours to restore power to a much smaller group of customers."

An outage map on LADWP.com shows a slew of trouble spots throughout the county. Hollywood, Downtown, Marina Del Ray and many more communities were reported to have outages.

LADWP also said crews have been working 16 hour shifts since Saturday in a frantic attempt to restore power.

Flex alerts were issued for three straight days over the weekend as officials urged residents to conserve power between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. A flex alert has not yet been declared for Tuesday.

City News Service contributed to this report.