Southern California Edison Power Outage Affects Thousands on Christmas Eve

A transformer failure at a Southern California Edison substation in the Norwalk/Downey area led to a widespread power outage on Christmas Eve, affecting tens of thousands of customers.

The outage occurred sometime after 2 p.m., although the cause was not immediately known. Southern California Edison spokesman Jeff Monford told City News Service that it was unclear how many customers were impacted by the outage or how quickly electrical service would be fully restored.

Despite the uncertainty, crews were able to re-route power to get most impacted customers back online relatively quickly. Metro C (Green) Line trains were halted between the Norwalk and Willowbrook/Rosa Parks stations due to the power issue, but buses were brought in to shuttle passengers between the stations. Electrical service on the light rail line was restored and trains began running again just before 5 p.m., according to the transit agency.

There were also reports of traffic lights being out at multiple intersections. The outage affected areas including Santa Fe Springs, Bellflower, and South Gate, with outages reported in Downey at 1:35 p.m. affecting 23,678 customers, and an additional 12,437 customers in the unincorporated area near Ada S. Nelson Elementary School in Whittier.