Community Corner

Updated: Whew! Lights Back On, Finally

Citizens endure their fifth outage in less than a month as emergency outage impedes on a planned outage.

For at least the fifth time in a month, residents of Lake Forest were hit with a power outage by Southern California Edison, this time leaving some without power for seven hours.   

The most recent began Monday at about 3 p.m., apparently as part of a planned outage, but an SCE spokesperson reported an emergency outage at 3:19 p.m. after workers discovered a malfunctioning gas switch underground. The switch was located on Rimhurst. 

Work is being done in the area near Trabuco and El Toro roads, near where a power pole snapped last month that closed that busy intersection for two days. Workers were replacing underground encasements on Trabuco, which was responsible for the planned outage. But the malfunctioning switch on Rimhurst prevented the Trabuco work from being done safely.   

After working throughout the afternoon to restore power to 828 residents, SCE estimated the power would be back on by 11:30 p.m. Nancy Rodriguez Casanova, spokesperson for the power company, originally estimated that workers would have the power back on by 5 p.m., but by 7 p.m. she was forced to revise the estimate to 11:30 p.m.

“It has nothing to do with natural gas or oil,” explained Casanova, who indicated the crews were going to take necessary safety precautions.

Electricity was restored to all customers at 10:10 p.m.

Casanova said the planned outage will be rescheduled. Of those 828 customers, 183 were part of the planned outage that began about 3 p.m.  

Boundaries for the affected area are Fern Leaf Drive to the north and El Toro Road to the south, Elsberry Way to the east and Old Trabuco Road to the west.   

Less than a week ago, Wednesday, 3,167 Edison customers lost power at about 6:21 p.m. A planned power outage was scheduled for the following night.   

On May 4, a power line snapped at the corner of Trabuco and El Toro roads.

Technically, the outage on Monday was two outages—the planned one that lasted about 20 minutes, and the unplanned one that lasted for several hours. That would be at least five outages for Lake Forest residences in less than a month.


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