More than 3,500 San Diego Gas & Electric customers lost power across Carlsbad and La Costa on Saturday evening, with outages first popping up around 5:45 p.m. and no clear explanation for what triggered the blackout. By 6:15 p.m., 3,721 customers were still sitting without electricity as crews worked to figure out what went wrong.
SDG&E told FOX 5 San Diego & KUSI News it expected to have power restored by 9:30 p.m. Saturday. Officials said the cause of the outage was unknown and remained under investigation, and no further details were immediately provided.
Not the First North County Blackout This Month
Saturday's outage marks the second time in roughly a week that Carlsbad-area residents have been left in the dark. A separate outage earlier in the month knocked out power for more than 2,000 SDG&E customers across North County, with disruptions first appearing around 11 a.m. in pockets of Oceanside and Carlsbad, according to Hoodline's prior reporting. That outage left 2,035 customers still without power as of 12:15 p.m., with La Costa, Fire Mountain, San Luis Rey and Ocean Hills identified as the hardest-hit communities. SDG&E had expected to restore power by 4 p.m. that day, though officials said that cause, too, was unknown and under investigation.
A Bigger Blackout Loomed Earlier This Year
North County has seen far larger outages in recent memory. Back in March, about 103,000 SDG&E customers lost power for roughly an hour one Thursday night, in a blackout that spanned sections of North County including Escondido, Encinitas and Carlsbad, as reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune. That blackout began at 7:41 p.m. and power was restored by 8:50 p.m. California ISO officials said at the time that an increase in north-south flow on a transmission line triggered an automated safety shutdown, though the agency was still investigating what caused the surge in flow in the first place.
For now, the cause of this weekend's blackout remains an open question, with SDG&E and local officials still working to pin down what knocked out power for thousands of residents.
