SCE Releases Long Beach Outage Investigation Reports

Utility shares findings with state regulator and Long Beach city
officials and commits to making improvements in the system

ROSEMEAD, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Southern California Edison today released internal and independent
investigative reports on the causes of two
power outages that affected the downtown Long Beach electrical network
last July. The incidents disrupted service to customers in the area
for several days.

SCE shared the findings
of its internal investigation as well as the results of an independent
investigation by Davies Consulting LLC with the California Public
Utilities Commission and the city of Long Beach.

The two reports, while differing in scope and methodology, agree that
the cause of the first outage on July 15 was the failure of several
critical components in the underground network to perform their network
protection functions due to improper operation and insufficient
management oversight of the system.

“We are deeply disappointed that the findings point to shortcomings in
SCE’s operation of the network,” said Pete Dietrich, SCE senior vice
president for Transmission and Distribution. “However, we are encouraged
that the investigations have identified issues that are correctable,
that we will learn from and that can help us improve the way we manage
the network to provide the kind of service to our customers that they
should expect from us.”

The reports identified the failure of an underground cable splice as the
event that triggered the July 15 outage. The Long Beach underground
network was designed to withstand the failure of a single component,
however, the cable splice failure led to a cascading series of failures
due to non-functioning network protection devices, resulting in the
entire downtown network being taken offline for inspection and repairs.

Both reports also found that damage sustained during the first outage
led to the second
outage on July 30.

SCE’s internal report outlined numerous steps the company is taking to
correct these issues and prevent future incidents. The company has
already taken some corrective actions on the system, including complete
and thorough inspections of every underground vault on the downtown
network system and additional and ongoing inspections on other parts of
the grid in Long Beach.

For additional information on the findings and links to the relevant
documents, please visit the SCE
newsroom for more information and to access the reports.

SCE
Findings — Davies
Report

About Southern California Edison

An Edison International (NYSE:EIX) company, Southern California Edison
is one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, serving a population
of nearly 14 million via 5 million customer accounts in a
50,000-square-mile service area within Central, Coastal and Southern
California.

Contacts

Media
Contact:
Southern California Edison
David Song, 626-302-2255