Nearly 1,000 Southern California Edison customers in Palm Springs lost electricity for roughly 14 hours Thursday after someone dug into underground utility lines near East Janet Circle, knocking out power during early-September weather. Southern California Edison reported the outage began shortly after 7 a.m. and affected 985 customers in the area around East Janet Circle, East Grace Circle, and portions of North Avenida Caballeros.
The utility attributed the cause to a dig into underground service, according to its outage website, as reported by KESQ. SCE listed an estimated restoration time of roughly 9 p.m. that day, meaning affected residents faced a stretch of nearly 14 hours without electricity during the warmest part of the afternoon.
What a Dig-In Actually Means
A dig into underground service typically happens when excavation equipment strikes buried electrical infrastructure, and it's a scenario state law is specifically designed to prevent. Under California Government Code Section 4216, anyone planning to excavate must contact DigAlert at least two working days beforehand so crews can mark underground lines, according to DigAlert. Skipping that step and damaging buried infrastructure can trigger civil fines up to $50,000 on top of the full cost of repairs.
The California Underground Facilities Safe Excavation Board is the state agency tasked with investigating dig-ins that damage high-priority infrastructure like electrical conduits, according to the California Water Environment Association. It remains unclear who performed the excavation near Janet Circle or whether SCE or state regulators intend to pursue penalties in this case.
A Common but Preventable Problem
Dig-ins like this one are far from rare. Southern California Gas Company reported in August 2025 that roughly 60% of underground utility dig-ins across its territory stemmed from a failure to call 811 before digging, and nearly 80% of those strikes happened on private property, per SoCalGas data. SCE's own field guidelines instruct excavators to outline dig areas with white paint or flags and use hand tools within 24 inches of marked lines, warning that even a minor nick to a buried cable can be disastrous and cause power outages, according to Energized by Edison.
Palm Springs sits within SCE's service territory, which covers the city and other western Coachella Valley communities, while the Imperial Irrigation District serves the eastern desert. SCE's 2025 reliability report recorded a systemwide average of about 545 minutes of outage time per customer and 1.4 sustained outages per customer for the year, giving some sense of how a single 14-hour blackout compares to typical annual disruption levels across the utility's territory.
Another Rough Week for Coachella Valley Power and Cooling
Thursday's outage landed amid a string of local power and cooling failures during a stretch of late-summer heat. On August 28, a regional power outage in Thermal knocked out air conditioning at two Coachella Valley Unified School District campuses in 110-degree heat, forcing early dismissals. An Aug. 31 early dismissal at Raymond Cree Middle School in Palm Springs was reported amid air-conditioning problems and a chiller pump failure.
Underground infrastructure failures have also caused wider blackouts elsewhere in the region recently. An underground electrical vault fire in Long Beach de-energized SCE lines and cut power to more than 22,000 customers during a regional heat wave on August 24. A brief cooling trend moved into the Coachella Valley ahead of Labor Day weekend, according to KESQ. Even so, the outage left nearly 1,000 customers without electricity for much of the day.
