Lately, Palos Verdes residents have had their fair share of candlelit dinners. It sounds romantic, right? Well, it’s not for the Seakings who haven’t had power for three days and are trying to do homework. Recently there have been many power outages and Palos Verdes High School even experienced one during classes. It has been a problem especially for people close to the school; there have been five power outages so far, ranging from one day to three days. Edison, the city’s power company, is responsible for these. Recently a group of technicians came out to see what the problem was. They identified the power line that was not functioning but said they could do nothing about it. “Another group has to come out and fix it. If we touch it, we’ll be fired” said one technician. Apparently only certain people are assigned to each area and those people alone have to fix any problems. Did they? No.
Just a few weeks ago we experienced another power outage, courtesy of a blown generator that also caused the fire that destroyed acres of land and threatened evacuation for many residents. So why are the power outages such a problem? Well for the students they are doing homework by candlelight and have no way to access the internet, and also for the family when there is no power there is no refrigerator, this causes all the food to go bad. How would you like to go to the grocery store and spend money only for all of it to go to waste? There is also no way that you could use any cooking appliances, takeout anyone? Also the force of the fuse blowing fried many appliances, and anyone with alarm system endured the incessant beeping and a fear of a fried alarm system. And will Edison reimburse you? Nope, they place that expense on the consumer, and unfortunately there is no way anyone could switch electricity providers.
On January 21st, PV residents experienced yet another power outage lasting a few hours but equally as irksome/bothersome. The power, when it eventually came back on, surged multiple times damaging many appliances that were hooked up to electricity at the time. One resident said, “I had my external harddrive plugged into the outlet and during the surges it was damaged. I had to pay for another one because Edison wouldn’t do anything about it.” In addition to damaged appliances, power outages can also cause the homeowner to have to reset clocks, appliances, and timers for sprinklers, lights, etc. According to one resident, “[The technicians] were able to turn our power back on but they had to hook up a generator right in the middle of our street! If you accidentally touched the line you would be shocked with thousands of volts of electricity and all Edison did was put a little plastic cover over it and hope no one touched it or ran over it with their car.”
The situation raised many dangers, but it also raises the question of when Edison will fix the power issues. Clearly there is a major problem if we are having 7+ outages in the time span of a few months. I have seen the numerous Edison trucks working on lines in multiple places to attempt to fix the issues but they are always gone within the hour or two to no avail. For both mine and the residents of PV’s sake, I hope they fix the power lines soon and stop all of these outages. If I were the CEO of Edison, I would have my head in my hands, wondering what went wrong and trying to fix it and I would be falling on my knees apologizing to my customers.