South Bay Power Outage Triggers Fear of Gasoline Price Hike

TORRANCE, CA -- The outage that left thousands in the South Bay without power and caused the total shutdown of the Torrance Refining Company triggered fear of another gasoline price hike.

The outage cause a total shutdown and partial evacuation of the Torrance Refining Company and a flaring event, which is still continuing Wednesday.

Southern California Edison said the outage was caused by a "wiring error" associated with an ongoing equipment upgrade project.

Refinery officials said restarting the facility will take several days, and crews "plan to do so safely with minimal noise and flaring."

"Following the last outage, we initiated discussions with SCE about improving their grid to the refinery and will obviously look to accelerate those discussions and action by SCE to provide more reliable electricity to the refinery and the community," according to the refinery, which is now owned by PBF Energy.

The refinery shutdown triggered fears of possible gas-price spikes in the area. Refinery officials said that despite the outage, "we are able to meet all of our commercial obligations in fuel markets."

Last month when the plant was shut down, which was also caused by an outage, gas prices in the region rose 7.4 cents.

The Torrance facility refines 20 percent of the gas supply for the Southern California market.

SCE apologized and has stopped work on the "reliability project" pending an "extensive and thorough review."

-- City News Service contributed to this story. Photo via Shutterstock