Calabasas joins Malibu in anger over SCE power cutoffs
The Calabasas City Council has voted to send a protest letter to Southern California Edison and the PUC after a two-and-a-half-day blackout last week.
By Hans Laetz
Calabasas residents are also furious about Southern California Edison power cutoffs. SCE says that residents should just go out and buy generators.
"That is the power provider equivalent of 'let them eat cake,'" said Calabasas resident Frances Allette.
Like Malibu, Calabasas was blacked out for two and a half days last week when a mild Santa Ana wind cropped up — not very strong as Santa Anas go. Now the Calabasas City Council appears to be fed up, at about the same stage where Malibu was maybe five or six years ago. Wednesday night the Calabasas City Council voted to send a strongly worded letter of protest to SCE and to the California Public Utilities Commission.
Former Calabasas Mayor Fred Gaines says it may be time now for the local council of governments, which includes Malibu, to start disconnecting from SCE's troublesome circuits.
"I actually think it's time for us, whether it be us individually or maybe in the COG, to hire our own consultant. Maybe we go to our legislator and say, get us the two, five, ten, twenty, hundred million dollars it takes to do that. I don't know what it costs to do that. But I don't know that we wait for SCE to tell us what the plan is. And I think we do need to look potentially at litigation."
Gaines says Malibu, Calabasas and other cities in the COG — the council of governments — need to act together to challenge the power outages.
As for residents like Frances Allette: "Edison is half-assing their way through a problem that they have had a very long time to fix."
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