By the Daily Post staff
9 p.m. — The number of Palo Alto electric customers without power continued to dwindle into the night. Crews restored power to most customers in College Terrace area around 3 p.m. after pumping out water from an underground vault that stores the failed transformer.
It’s “not an ideal situation” for these vaults to get filled with water, utilities spokeswoman Catherine Elvert said.
However, it is a “physical reality” since they are below ground and water can seep in through the dirt, seams or cracks, she said.
Around 37 customers in the College Terrace area were still without power at around 9 p.m. Tuesday.
Palo Alto saw about 1.3 inches of rain in 24 hours, according to NOAA’s rainfall gauges. Today is forecasted to be dryer, with showers picking back up later in the week.
6:50 p.m. — The power outage has been reduced to just 77 customers. It appears that water from today’s heavy rains flooded an underground utilities vault, causing the lines to short out. City workers are now pumping the water out.
2:20 p.m. — The city of Palo Alto’s Utilities Department says power has been cut to 1,300 customers in the California Avenue district and the College Terrace area.
A crew has been sent to the area to find out what happened and make repairs, the department says via its Twitter account.
The power went out at 1:45 p.m. There’s no time for when service will be restored.
Police are asking people that they not call 911 to report the outage. Police are aware of the outage and such 911 calls would clog up the lines for people placing calls about real emergencies.
So is CPAU finally going to start issuing refunds for these outages? With all their rate hikes and the size of the rate hikes and CPAU head making more than the president of the US, they can certainly afford it.
Too bad their priority is risky Fiber instead of fixing the reliability of the electrical system, esp. since they’re pushing everyone toward it.