Yet Another Palm Frond Causes
Yet Another SCE Outage

Lack of preventive maintenance, once again, means that yet another palm frond caused a power outage in Beverly Hills on February 19. According to Southern California Edison, more than 3,000 households were affected. An earlier outage, on Nov. 21, 2004, blacked out 187 households. It may have been the exact same palm tree at Rexford and Carmelita that caused both outages in this neighborhood.

Mark Olson, Region Manager of Public Affairs for SCE, says he called headquarters and was told that no one will come from SCE to re-set anyone's clocks, or the AM / FM stations which were scrambled by the outage.

There appear to be no consequences for SCE's lack of preventive maintenance.

However, our own people, clearing the alleys, should be vigilant in observing the likelihood of a resident's palm frond needing to be trimmed, to prevent another such occurrence. They, in turn could notify SCE.

In response to a query from Beverly Hills Citizen, Olson stated that the utility "does do preventative maintenance, and we do strive to have reliable service.

"The weekend in question was during a storm period, and we had outages throughout the region related to weather. Specific to the Beverly Hills area, there were two circuits out at the same time on that weekend: Feb. 19 10:05 am Out, most Customers On by 11:17 a.m., a few Customers out until 4 p.m. The affected area was the East Border of the city between Sunset and Burton Way."