SAN DIEGO (AP) — The lights are back on in Arizona and steadily returning to parts of Southern California and Mexico after a power outage affecting millions of people.
By early Friday, energy had been restored to some 930,000 users in the region. That’s according to a combined tally provided by officials in Arizona, California and Mexico.
Authorities say the outage was accidentally triggered about 4 p.m. Thursday when an electrical worker removed a piece of monitoring equipment at a power substation in southwest Arizona.
The San Diego area was hit especially hard with power severed to all of San Diego Gas & Electric Co.’s 1.4 million household and business customers, the company said.
The outage extended into southern Orange County, across California’s inland deserts, as far east as Yuma, Ariz., and into Mexico. The region is home to some 6 million people, though it was impossible to say exactly how many had lost power.
