SMUD restores power after downtown Sacramento substation fire sparked 3-day outage
The Sacramento Municipal Utility District has repaired a network severely damaged in a fire earlier this week, SMUD officials said Friday morning, restoring power to roughly 550 downtown customers who had been in the dark close to roughly 67 hours.
“The downtown network is up and running,” the utility wrote in a statement at 7:35 a.m. “We thank our customers for their patience, our crews and others who made the repairs and employees who helped our customers.”
Power first went out to about 1,300 homes and businesses in the downtown area midday Tuesday, when a fire erupted at SMUD’s Station A at Sixth and H streets.
SMUD said one of three networks sustained “extensive” damage, while the other two were de-energized as a precaution so that firefighters could safely put out the blaze, the cause of which remains unknown.
Those two networks were re-energized Wednesday, bringing back electricity to about 750 of the 1,300. Power remained interrupted Wednesday and Thursday for the remaining customers.
In updates throughout the week, SMUD said crews had been working “24/7” to repair the damage.
SMUD said the last step of the repair involved “tying in one network to the other,” which required a planned outage for one of the two remaining networks. SMUD said it cut power to 66 homes and 112 businesses Friday morning; those have also been restored.
A Sacramento Bee review of SMUD records and planning documents found the substation that caught fire was “nearing the end of useful life” as of 2015. In news releases after The Bee’s story was published, SMUD said the substation was “never found to be a safety hazard” and that it is inspected at least every two months, last checked in October.
The more widespread outage Tuesday evening forced the evacuation of the 108-unit Edgewater Apartments, an affordable housing senior living tower in the 600 block of I Street. Fire personnel said conditions were not safe due to the lack of light and heat, and that some residents also relied on electricity for ventilators.
Residents were given hotel vouchers or allowed to stay at City Hal. They were cleared to return to Edgewater on Wednesday afternoon once power was restored to Edgewater.
The 550 customers who’d been stuck in a three-day outage included nearly all of Old Sacramento Waterfront District, where a handful of shops opened Thursday despite a lack of electricity.
Old Sacramento director Scott Ford said Thursday that district should be able to proceed with holiday-themed festivities — the Theatre of Lights holiday lighting program and the California State Railroad Museum’s Polar Express train rides — if power was back on by Friday morning as SMUD projected.
Ford said the winter holidays typically mark Old Sacramento’s most profitable time of the year, and urged shoppers to patronize the district this weekend.
This story was originally published December 17, 2021 at 8:01 AM.
