Major power outage disrupts US southwest, Mexico

LOS ANGELES–A massive power outage triggered traffic gridlock and left at least 1.4 million customers without electricity overnight into Friday in southern California, Arizona and Mexico, officials said.

Power was restored early Friday in southern California about 12 hours after the outage, San Diego Gas and Electric said in a statement.

“The restoration process, however, has left our local power grid very fragile and we are asking our customers to conserve electricity throughout the day Friday,” said David Geier, SDG&E’s vice president for electric operations.

The lights also came back in northwestern Mexico, after power was restored to 97 percent of the border state of Baja California, Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission said.

Amid sweltering temperatures, a number of people had to be rescued from stuck elevators and theme park rides, reports said, while two units at a nuclear power plant tripped offline, as designed.

San Diego airport cancelled all departures after the failure on a 500-kilovolt line, which left people sweating through a miniature heat wave without air conditioning or power for fridges.

There was no suggestion that terrorism caused the outage, which comes amid jitters ahead of the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

The outage originated in western Arizona. State power company APS said it appeared to be related to a procedure by one of its employees in a substation near Yuma, which somehow triggered a wider shutdown.

SDG&E said an incident in the network between Arizona and California had caused the outage, which also affected neighboring Mexico.