The power went out at noon today for several businesses in the La Habra Marketplace on Imperial Highway. Several restaurants and a party supply store went dark while workers from Southern California Edison (SCE) tried to restore electricity.
SCE works to restore power to several businesses in La Habra after an outage July 9, 2010
Dennis Koutsopoulos, a private security guard from Allied Barton, said that bad cables were the cause. A workman from SCE said they were trying to reroute power from a different substation until another crew could come in and replace the bad cable.
Sarah Fares and Ciara Collins handed out coupons to customers who had to be turned away during the blackout.
Several businesses, from International House of Pancakes to Red Robin closed. ToGo’s, in the middle of the blackout area, remained open, but was serving only cold food and accepting only cash. Businesses put hand-lettered signs on their doors, and some gave out coupons for later redemption or directed customers to other stores unaffected by the power failure.
Power is expected to be restored by midnight.
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Update July 10, 9:30 a.m-Outage part of an ongoing problem
Power was restored at 10 p.m. Friday, but it was more extensive than I previously reported. Thursday night over 2000 locations were without power, according to Jessica, the manager of Panera. Her bakers, who come in each night at ten, had to do their baking at another store because the power was out at the La Habra store and at over 2000 other locations. She said that yesterday 94 businesses and residences were affected.
For Panera, that meant serving the customers who were already in the store, then shutting down Friday at noon.
“I felt really bad because some people had driven a long distance,” said Jessica.
But without power they have no means of tracking customers’ payments to maintain accountability, and the safety of customers in a dark building was a concern.
“What if someone fell?” she said.
She’s hopeful that last night’s repairs will hold until Southern California Edison can come up with a permanent fix.
Thursday “they put a Band-Aid on it,” she said, “and yesterday they put another Band-Aid on it.”
