After a series of power outages during summer in the Trousdale Estates neighborhood of Beverly Hills, including one that lasted for more than 24-hours, the Beverly Hills City Council pressed representatives from Southern California Edison during an Oct. 11 meeting. (Beverly Press/Park Labrea News file photo)

Following a power outage last month that left 213 Trousdale Estates residents without electricity for more than a day, Southern California Edison employees appeared before the Beverly Hills City Council on Oct. 11, where they came under fire from council members and residents.

For more than an hour, Mayor Lili Bosse and her colleagues pressed Edison employees about the outages, Edison’s response and their plans for improvement, while residents called in to air complaints.

“We had truly a disastrous experience in our community,” Bosse said. “People were sitting in the darkness. There was no communication, no updates for medicine. People felt very unsafe in their homes because they were unable to turn on their alarms. They were losing their food and clearly their quality of life.”

Bosse had previously summoned Edison representatives to an Aug. 23 regular meeting to answer for prior Trousdale Estates outages. Council members asked the representatives to return in November with a progress report, but when the neighborhood’s electricity shut off again on Sept. 9 and wasn’t restored until Sept. 11, Bosse asked the representatives to return sooner.

“It was incomprehensible to even expect that situation. So, because of that, we’ve moved up the timeline for you to be here,” Bosse said.

Aaron Smith, SCE’s director of construction and maintenance of the northwest division, blamed the Sept. 9 outage on a circuit failure, and said that an “unprecedented” telecommunications error at the distribution operations center extended the outage by about 12 hours.

“We’re here to extend our commitment to the city that we will do better,” Rudy Gonzalez, principal manager for local public affairs said. “We’ve let you down, we haven’t met our own expectations, and we certainly haven’t met the expectations of the community.”

Gonzalez said that Edison has had problems in a “small area of the community served by a couple of problematic circuits,” though he added that the utility has developed a scope of work to improve those circuits.

Councilwoman Sharona Nazarian said while there were few residents present at the meeting, council members have received extensive testimony from dissatisfied constituents.

She then asked “if we have ever missed a payment.” It was unclear if Nazarian was referring to the city or to residents.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Gonzalez said.

“So, from my understanding our residents do their part. We have paid and honored our end of the deal as a city, and I think it’s really important to kind of highlight exactly what steps you’re going to be taking to honor your part,” Nazarian said.

Smith then explained how his team of 1,700 employees covers an area of about 300 square miles, adding that each piece of equipment in the area has a maintenance plan that calls for an inspection every three-to-five years.

Nazarian pressed him further.

“I hear that you guys are trying and I hear that you want to address the needs of the community. But it seems like maybe you need to hire more people at this point, [or] pay overtime. I do not know. … But whatever is being done now is not working,” Nazarian said.

She and other council members also grilled the Edison representatives about the utility’s instruction that residents should file claims for damages they incurred during the outage.

Asked if any of the claims had been honored, Smith said, “I don’t know offhand, but we could check,” adding it “is not atypical … to file [a claim] independently.”

Councilman Lester Friedman asked what the utility is doing to repair the four main circuits that provide power to Trousdale Estates.

An Edison representative responded that they are increasing the voltage output of one of the circuits, and tying two of the other circuits together, “therefore allowing us the opportunity to shift load when there’s an outage … on one circuit onto another circuit that’s operating properly,” adding that those changes were expected to be finished by the first quarter of 2023.

Bosse said that Edison’s responses to the council’s questions did not ease her concerns.

“I was really hoping that the conversation would somehow make the community feel better. From my perspective, thus far, I feel worse and that is a problem,” she said.

In an Oct. 18 interview, Edison spokesman David Song further explained the utility’s repairs. Following the Sept. 9 outage, Edison employees used temporary solutions to restore power before implementing permanent fixes on Sept. 14, Song said.

Going forward, the utility is going to work to “future proof” the system so that it can withstand the additional burdens of more electric cars and renewable energy, Song said, adding that the utility’s work to enhance the system’s capacity should be completed by February 2023.

The utility had previously used one-way routes that pushed power to customers. With residential renewable energy systems becoming more common, the utility is now installing two-way routes that push power to customers and back into the grid, which will increase the system’s overall capacity.

“We’re doing what we call a circuit coat over, in other words expanding and making capacity larger,” Song said.

He reaffirmed Edison’s commitment to working with City Council to rectify the issue.

“Going forward, we are going to participate regularly in City Council meetings to provide progress updates. We are committed to working with the city to make sure the outage that happened in September won’t happen again,” Song said.

This article was updated with additional information on Oct. 20, 2022.