Power mostly restored after outages affect thousands in Orange County

Power outages across Orange County left thousands without electricity for a while Saturday morning, according to Southern California Edison.

At 8:30 a.m., “failed equipment” left at least 5,000 Laguna Beach residents without power. By early afternoon, only a few dozen were still affected, according to Taelor Bakewell, a spokesperson for the utility, and full service was expected to be restored by 3 p.m.

Another outage that left thousands in the dark in Seal Beach on Saturday morning was caused by a downed power line, police said on social media, adding that residents in and around the Leisure World retirement community may have been affected.

Leisure World is home to nearly 10,000 seniors, one-third of the Seal Beach population. The Seal Beach outage was resolved by early afternoon.

According to Bakewell, the outages were not related to rainy weather in Southern California. “We have a very wide service area — it’s about 50,000 square miles,” she said. “It can be a range of different reasons for outages, so there isn’t one specific cause, especially for the Orange County area today.”