The start of the workweek was delayed in parts of Butte County after electricity service was interrupted for most of Monday morning.
About 79,000 households, mainly in Butte County, lost electrical power Monday morning after a major transformer failed at Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s Table Mountain substation near Oroville.
The malfunction knocked out power to Chico, Paradise and Magalia at about 8:15 on Monday. Parts of Oroville and Durham also went dark, disrupting routines and causing traffic delays.
PG&E spokesman Paul Moreno said the problem originated with the failure of a switch. The fault caused damage to a large transformer.
“Exactly what caused this switch to fail, we will be investigating that,” Moreno said. “It certainly doesn’t appear to be weather related, and but we don’t have a squirrel or other animal culprit involved in this outage.”
Many retailers, unable to run cash registers or process credit card payments, kept their doors shut. Without electricity to run pumps, gas stations were unable to dispense fuel.
Utility crews were able to restore power to about 3,500 in Chico within a few hours by rerouting power to an unaffected circuit. Electric service was fully restored shortly after noon.
A few traffic accidents were reported in and around Chico during the outage. Lt. David Britt with the Chico police department said some motorists seem to forget to treat malfunctioning traffic lights as stop signs. Chico police reported a few fender-benders, but no major injury accidents.
Chico Fire and Rescue freed people trapped in elevators at the Holiday Inn and the newly constructed courthouse, as well as on the CSU, Chico campus where four students were trapped in an elevator in Holt Hall for about 30 minutes. One university staffer also was trapped in an elevator at 35 Main Street for approximately 45 minutes.
