SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Power has been restored to nearly 800 SMUD customers after Tuesday's fire at SMUD power substation in Downtown Sacramento.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but as of Thursday morning, SMUD says about 550 customers are still in the dark. The company is still on track to have power restored by Friday morning, with just a few final steps to go.
"Our crews, they have been working through the night in this weather and they have made significant progress towards restoring power to the rest of the customers," Lindsay Vanlaningham, a spokesperson for SMUD said. "It is a significant amount of work, obviously there was extensive damage, but they have made great progress."
The outage is impacting businesses in Old Sacramento too, as many have been forced to shut their doors for more than two days. Business owners say this is horrible timing for them, during one of their busiest times of the year, as Christmas is now only nine days away.
"We were expecting this week and especially the weekend should be quite a lot busier and who knows now what's going to happen, so cross our fingers," Ann Khan, co-owner of Old City Kites, said.
Scott Ford, the Old Sacramento Waterfront District Director, told ABC10 their businesses are already feeling the financial hit of this outage.
“There’s lots of impacts, whether its food product that they’re trying to keep fresh, we’re working with several of the restaurants on opportunities to bring in refrigeration trucks, things of that nature to salvage that, but I think the unknown is the difficult part here," Ford said.
The Downtown Sacramento Partnership says they are working to get the power restored for special holiday events like the Polar Express and the Theatre of Lights on Thursday night.
As for the fire investigation that caused these outages, ABC10 obtained SMUD report from November 2015 calling for the substation to be rebuilt. In the report, SMUD says they have owned and operated the substation since the 1940s and constructed the outdoor portion of it in the 1950s.
"The existing substation equipment is nearing the end of useful life and requires replacement, upgrade and additional space to maintain station a as a reliable power source for downtown Sacramento," the 2015 report said.
However, SMUD says that report is misleading.
“End of life is actually a significant amount of time and it does vary depending upon the maintenance and the care of the substation number one, so to say that it was a safety hazard is not accurate," Vanlaningham said. “That facility was last inspected just two months ago in October, we inspect our facilities every two months."
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Small businesses and seniors feel the impact of the downtown Sacramento power outage.