Wire failure leaves thousands without power

Thousands of Newport Beach businesses and homes were left without power this weekend after an underground wire failed, causing outages on many of the islands and along Bayside Drive, officials said.

Among those affected by Sunday’s outage was Fire Station No. 4 on Balboa Island.

Southern California Edison reported 2,198 of its customers were affected by the downed wire at 11:29 a.m., officials said. All but 142 of those had power back up 35 minutes later because of the rerouting of power grids, spokesman Gil Alexander said.

“This is typically a very common scenario as those left without power the longest were closest to where the cable failed,” Alexander said. “The closer we get to a problem the harder time we have isolating alternatives for a customer.”

No major accidents or injuries were reported as a result of the outages, authorities said. Edison investigators are still researching the cause of the wire malfunction.

— Kelly Strodl