JENNA JAUREGUI
CO-EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

A hush fell over Cal State San Marcos last Thursday as every air conditioner, fluorescent light, and computer abruptly stopped working. The campus went dark around 3:30 p.m. when a highvoltage power line between Arizona and Southern California failed, leaving 1.4 million San Diego Gas and Electric customers suddenly without power.

The unprecedented outage affected millions of people from Mexico to Orange County to parts of Arizona. All electricity users, including stores, gas stations, schools, offices and residences were completely without power. Traffic gridlocked throughout the county as people tried to navigate the lightless intersections. Due to the initial mystery behind the outage, the high volume of commuters and crippled safety resources, county authorities declared the situation a local emergency.

Because the sudden loss of power affected such a massive area and occurred just before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, many people were afraid the outage may have been a result of another terrorist attack. SDG&E confirmed otherwise in a press statement released on Friday.

“The power outage began with a major transmission outage in western Arizona that caused a loss of power to southern California. Shortly afterward, the San Onofre Generating Station went off line. As a result, SDG&E did not have adequate resources on its system to keep power on across its service territory,” SDG&E officials said.

SDG&E announced at about 3:30 a.m. Friday morning that power had been restored to many of its customers. CSUSM and San Diego State University, among other community colleges and schools, remained closed on Friday. The outage cost the San Diego area economy more than $100 million, according to the National University System Institute for Policy Research. Officials are still investigating the reasons behind the widespread power loss.

Photos courtesy of Jenna Jauregui