Calabasas officials are weighing how to seek accountability from Southern California Edison and state regulators after a three-day blackout exposed residents’ concerns about restoration updates, emergency communications and the cost of outages. At an October 28 public hearing, residents described losses and pressed for better information and infrastructure improvements; the City Council has since formed an ad hoc committee to develop the city’s response.
The outage ran from October 15 through October 17, triggered by wildfire concerns amid forecasts of strong winds, according to The Acorn. SCE had given advance notice of the shutoff, but by the morning of October 16, internet and cellphone service had failed in many neighborhoods, cutting off schools, gas stations, supermarkets and even streetlights, per the same report. SCE had initially estimated power would return by 5 a.m., but restoration came later than that estimate, with some neighborhoods not getting power back until around 4 p.m. on October 17.
Families Tally Losses From Days in the Dark
Residents’ reported costs ranged from spoiled groceries to backup power and temporary lodging. The Acorn reported that Susie Cooper’s family lost more than $1,000 in groceries, while Brad McCall’s household went 84 hours without electricity. Residents also described spending money on generators and batteries to get through the outage.
Residents also told the council they had lost work time, struggled to operate medical equipment and received little useful information about when service would return. SCE’s 2026 Public Safety Power Shutoff Action Plan addresses the utility’s approach to shutoffs.
Emergency Calls and Backup Power Become Flashpoints
For some Calabasas and neighboring Malibu residents, the stakes went beyond inconvenience. At the same Wednesday-night Calabasas hearing covered by CBS Los Angeles, residents said repeated shutoffs had cut off their ability to call 911 and to receive emergency notifications. That meeting followed a three-day outage earlier in October that struck while Santa Ana winds fueled the Bryson Fire in Malibu, the station reported.
At the Calabasas hearing, Justin Bitensky questioned who decides to initiate a shutoff. Residents also urged the city to seek battery backup for traffic signals and to pursue burying the remaining overhead power lines in Calabasas. Telecommunications providers are expected to supply up to 72 hours of backup power during outages, but residents said emergency calling and notifications had still been disrupted.
Council Members Pitch Compensation and Oversight Ideas
James Bozajian, who placed the hearing on the agenda alongside Alicia Weintraub, floated several concrete remedies: automatic bill credits for days without electricity, state regulatory changes that would allow compensation for spoiled food, and grants or subsidies to help residents buy their own generators and batteries.
Weintraub said her neighborhood had gone at least 10 days without electricity over the preceding 12 to 18 months and called the pattern untenable. She urged closer engagement with the California Public Utilities Commission, meetings with AT&T, Spectrum and other providers about service failures, and coordination through the Las Virgenes-Malibu Council of Governments, which includes Agoura Hills, Westlake Village, Malibu and Hidden Hills. She also called for documenting all outages, not only major shutoffs, and for SCE to consider circuit segmentation: shared circuits can leave some Calabasas homeowners without power while nearby homes remain lit.
Residents and council members also raised infrastructure review and accountability. Former mayor Fred Gaines proposed an independent consultant to assess SCE’s infrastructure plans and outage-prone circuits, suggested considering litigation and urged state lawmakers to revisit PSPS legislation; Council member Peter Kraut supported the consultant proposal. Brad McCall asked the city to seek a circuit-by-circuit improvement plan and a detailed accounting of the October shutoff separating weather delays from inspection, repair and restoration time. Residents said the Braewood neighborhood has experienced 23 power shutoffs since 2021.
SCE Points to Grid-Hardening Work Already Underway
SCE government affairs representative Stephanie Molen acknowledged residents' concerns at the hearing. The utility has said it is installing covered conductors and burying power lines in the area, including work in Calabasas to place lines underground, SCE told CBS Los Angeles. Company plans call for roughly 210 miles of undergrounding work overall, including 110 miles specifically in the Las Virgenes-Malibu area, plus thousands of miles of covered conductors systemwide — work SCE says must be completed by the end of 2028.
Part of that effort includes the Paradise Circuit project, for which SCE says construction began in late June 2026 with completion expected during the third quarter of 2027; underground work for that project will run along Old Topanga Canyon Road within Calabasas, according to an SCE fact sheet. SCE also notes that its Vicasa and Milo circuits serve parts of Topanga and Malibu in addition to Calabasas, and offers an online grid-hardening map so residents can check which circuits have completed or planned improvements. The utility's Medical Baseline Program offers additional support for qualifying customers who depend on electricity for medical needs.
Power Shutoffs Across the Region
The numbers suggest the problem isn't isolated to this one October blackout. SCE’s 2026 PSPS Action Plan addresses systemwide shutoff events. The utility has also warned, per CBS Los Angeles, that shutoffs could happen more frequently, affect more customers and last longer in 2026 due to rising fire risk. SCE's most recent systemwide reliability report put its 2025 average interruption duration at about 545 minutes per customer and its average interruption frequency at 1.4 sustained outages per customer — systemwide figures, not numbers specific to Calabasas.
SCE Shutoffs in a Longer View
The Calabasas outage sits within a wider pattern of SCE shutoff activity, though the figures are systemwide rather than specific to the city. The California Public Utilities Commission said SCE initiated 20 PSPS events in 2024, its largest single-year total at the time. SCE’s 2026 action plan, described above, reports 12 events in 2020, 20 in 2024 and 14 in 2025; these figures do not provide a comparison with other California utilities. A much broader earlier event provides another point of context: in its report to the CPUC, SCE documented a PSPS event from October 27 to November 4, 2019, that de-energized 126,364 customers across 12 counties, including Los Angeles County, over two weather systems. That regional event was far larger than the Calabasas blackout. The cited records offer historical benchmarks, not a complete comparison of customer impacts and event durations across utilities from 2019 through 2025. Sources: California Public Utilities Commission; Southern California Edison’s 2019 post-event report.
Calabasas has continued to press for grid hardening and reliability upgrades. A December community meeting addressed ongoing reliability complaints.
What Comes Next
The city council voted unanimously to create the new ad hoc committee, made up of Bozajian and Weintraub, to develop an action plan for seeking changes from state regulators and coordinating with other affected communities. The committee will identify which issues fall under state regulators, the legislature, SCE or the city's own jurisdiction, and will develop priorities before preparing a letter to the CPUC. The council also discussed the feasibility and cost of adding backup systems for traffic signals and telecommunications infrastructure. Calabasas officials say another community meeting with SCE will be scheduled soon.
