Outage that Left Thousands Without Power in Hermosa Beach Blamed on 'Wiring Error'

REDONDO BEACH, CA -- The outage that left thousands of South Bay residents without power early Tuesday morning was blamed on a 'wiring error,' Southern California Edison said Wednesday.

The error is associated with an ongoing equipment upgrade project that knocked out service to about 100,000 customers in parts of Gardena, Hawthorne, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach and Torrance.

The outage started at 5:41 a.m. and lasted approximately one hour and power was restored to all residents by 7 a.m., SCE said.

"Progress on this reliability project necessitated temporarily modifying components in a Torrance substation," according to the utility. "A wiring error associated with that modification resulted in an outage Tuesday morning when there was increased power use following the long holiday weekend."

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

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

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.

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