(Originally published April 14, 2006 by the Pacific Coast Business Times)
Business owners across the South Coast are charged up after a series of power outages cost them thousands of dollars in lost sales and profits.
The problem is so bad that some companies have filed damage claims against Southern California Edison. In response, Edison, which refused to pay the claims, said it will soon begin a multimillion-dollar effort to replace its Depression-era infrastructure.
But the number of outages in the Santa Barbara area has put some owners in a state of shock. “It’s been a nightmare,” said Scott Stanley, owner of Esau’s Coffee shop on State Street.
Stanley said power was shut off in early March after a cable underneath Gutierrez Street failed. He had to wait for a new cable to be brought in to get his power back.
Stanley put in a claim against Edison, the claim was denied, he appealed it and the company denied the claim again. The incident was not the first to disrupt his business, Stanley said.
“We each pay $1,000 a month for power, but when they do something wrong they don’t pay,” Stanley said. “I lost $3,000 worth of sales.”
Two weeks later a falling palm frond damaged the line leading to a second Esau’s location in Carpinteria, causing him to lose another $3,000 in revenue.
Edison officials blame most of the incidents on the weather, car accidents or lines chewed through by animals. Ernie Villegas, a spokesman for Edison who was regional manager for Santa Barbara for eight years, said the company has little control over most incidents. Villegas said that the company is working to upgrade its infrastructure.
“Edison throughout its whole territory is trying to go ahead and spend millions and millions of dollars on system reliability,” he said. “In Santa Barbara’s case, one of the older areas is the distribution.”
In some areas of Santa Barbara, particularly near the intersection of lower State and Gutierrez streets, the electricity infrastructure dates as far back as the 1930s, Villegas said.
Systems around upper State Street and in parts of Carpinteria and Goleta are just as antiquated. Villegas said Santa Barbara joins the San Joaquin Valley as Edison’s oldest territory.
Meanwhile, aging equipment is causing chaos for business owners throughout Santa Barbara. A March 13 transformer explosion woke East Side residents and shut down operations at the Trader Joe’s store on south Milpas Street for more than 12 hours.
According to store Captain Phil Archambault, who was supervising operations at that time, the power was out from 4 a.m to 7 p.m. He couldn’t open the store during that time, he said, and lost the entire day’s sales.
Although he wouldn’t disclose an amount for one day’s sales, he said that the store typically gets around 14,000 customers per week. The power failure cost the store 2,000 customers, he said. The store also had to purchase dry ice to keep its frozen and refrigerated goods cool and all but a few critical employees were sent home for the day.
“It’s a mad scramble to get it all together,” Archambault said of the incident.
Villegas said that the outage impacted 34,000 customers, most of whom lost power for only a short time because automatic bypass procedures quickly isolated the affected circuits and rerouted power. Most customers were up within a two hour period, but, according to Edison, Trader Joe’s was left in the dark because the affected transformer fed the store directly.
Some business owners have begun purchasing generators and backup power systems. Others, such as Trader Joe’s, have turned to their insurance companies to pay the claims.
“It’s a problem that has been really endemic for years and years and years,” said business owner Gene Zannon.
Zannon and his wife live above his Santa Barbara Pistachio Co. operation on the 400 block of State Street. He said that there was a 26-hour-long power outage in early March, and another shorter outage toward the end of the month
“It’s just a bad infrastructure that they refuse to update. The fact that they won’t take responsibility for it is really two-faced,” he said.
Frustrated customers can appeal to the California Public Utilities Commission or go to small claims court, Villegas said. But Stanley, the owner of Esau’s, said he doesn’t have time for the claims process or court.
“It’s just not my style,” he said. “I’m just too busy trying to run two businesses and my private life. I just bit the bullet.”
Like Esau’s and the pistachio company, one of the city’s best known coffee purveyor’s has also been affected.
“Back in January we lost a full day of business,” said Matt Moore, director of operations at the Santa Barbara Roasting Co. The company’s roastery is located on Motor Way, near the intersection of Gutierrez and State streets.
Moore said that for the past few weeks there has been at least one outage a week, usually at night. The loss of walk-in business costs the company the most, he said, but coffee beans could be at risk as well if an outage occurred while they were in the roaster.
But Villegas said that his company responds as quickly as possible to outages, even if they are not the company’s fault. Troublemen—the Edison employees who respond to outages—can respond to an outage in an hour. It may take longer to identify the specific problem, Villegas said, but the impact can be minimized with switching equipment that can isolate the problem to a small section of the grid.
Soon, more of these automatic reclosures and other new equipment may arrive if Edison can carry through on its promises to its customers. Six or seven years ago, Villegas said, the company launched a program called Project Santa Barbara to begin to replace old lead cables and other components of the old system. He said he was able to secure $4.5 million in additional funds for the program.
Some work has already begun to replace aging overhead lines in Carpinteria. Within 30 days, Villegas said, the company will begin work to replace the systems on lower and upper State Street. The work won’t end until the end of the year, and could include planned outages.
“For the overall impact we’re going to try work as strategically as we can,” he said. “When we have a planned outage, we notify the city and all those commercial and residential customers ahead of time.”
