Another power outage affecting the town business area and many residential neighborhoods is planned between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. Wednesday, April 16. Several smaller and limited outages have also occurred since the April outage, which affected much of the local area, including Pine Cove.
“We are putting in equipment to make the substation more efficient,” said Louis Davis, Southern California Edison region manager. “We are upgrading from 4,000 volts to 12,000 volts.”
Davis was very apologetic to the community and understands the frustration SCE is imposing, but Idyllwild has only one substation. No duplication of equipment is available. Power cannot be shifted to other equipment or back-ups used while this substation is shut down.
“There is no good time to shut off the power,” he explained. “We try to avoid nights because of the temperatures and people needing alarms in the morning.”
The new equipment should eliminate some future problems and possibly avoid those outages, but Davis stressed that Idyllwild is “… a little remote and it take longer for service vehicles to get here.”
