The Wachs family’s power went out at 10:20 p.m. Friday, just before the ferocity of this weekend’s epic storm reached its peak, lashing Southern California with record winds, rain and snow.
At 7 p.m. Sunday — 45 hours after they lost electricity and hot water — the home of the family of five in Tarzana was still cold and dark. Hannah Wachs and her husband, Jeffrey, spent Saturday checking the electricity supply malfunction card over and over, tracking the ever-changing estimate of when their lights would come back on and whether a crew had been assigned to remedy their blackout.
“My husband and I would get several robo calls from LADWP,” Wachs said. “His call said the power would be back on at 2:30pm, but then I got another call a few minutes later saying it would be a long time before anything happened.”
The Wachses sent their three daughters – ages 11, 14 and 16 – to friends’ house so they could stay warm and do their homework. Meanwhile, a large uprooted tree in their neighborhood that knocked down power lines lay unattended in the street. Wachs said she drove past the tree many times, but she hasn’t seen any crew yet.
According to LA Department of Water and Power spokeswoman Ellen Cheng, an estimated 46,000 homes in Los Angeles County were still without power as of Sunday evening. Power had been restored to about 118,000 customers since the start of the storm, she said.
Many customers used social media during the weekend, indignant that their electricity had been out for almost two days. Some feared that their insulin and other medications would be used rendered unusable without refrigeration, while others, like the Waches, saw groceries worth hundreds of dollars spoiled.
“In the grand scheme of the world, these are so small potatoes,” Wachs said. “But I’d like to think our city could do better.” At 8 p.m. on Sunday, the DWP’s outage map indicated that 574 customers in Tarzana were without power and that it would not be restored until 2:30 p.m. the next day.
According to the DWP’s website, customers can expect crews to respond within 24 to 48 hours, but the utility also says it may take longer to restore their power than the charts indicate.
“As our work crews navigate fallen trees and power lines to restore service, the estimated recovery times on our outage map may not reflect current field conditions and the work required to make repairs,” the agency tweeted Sunday afternoon.
In another tweet on sunday, the utility explained that rain and high winds toppled trees, power lines and poles, and crews must clear the trees and debris before they can restore service — “which takes time and delays recovery from outages,” the DWP said. . “Crews have prioritized recovery work involving broken or downed power poles and power lines as these incidents pose a public hazard.”
Other failures were caused by flooding of underground electrical systems. Crews have to go from vault to vault to identify the source of the damage, “which can also be time-consuming,” the utility said. “We know this is frustrating and we appreciate your patience as we work to restore service.”
For her part, Wachs said she knows the DWP can’t work miracles. “I get it, it’s a lot and it’s hard,” she said. “But they saw this coming. Can’t they go into overdrive a bit?”
