The lights were back on Friday morning in Arizona and steadily returning to parts of Southern California and Mexico after a major power outage that cut electricity to millions of people, according to AP. Residents sweltered without air conditioners in the heat and San Diego's freeway and airport traffic were paralyzed. The outage was accidentally triggered Thursday afternoon when an electrical worker removed a piece of monitoring equipment at a power substation in southwest Arizona, officials at Phoenix-based Arizona Public Service Co. said. It was unclear why that mishap triggered such a widespread outage, and the company has launched an investigation. The San Diego area was hit especially hard, with power severed to all of San Diego Gas & Electric Co.'s 1.4 million customers. Residents poured into the few bars that remained open in downtown San Diego after dark, some donning reading lights on their heads like miners. A pair of men carried flaming tiki torches - usually planted in backyards - to see down the pitch black street. The outage extended into southern Orange County, across California's inland deserts, as far east as Yuma, Arizona, and into Mexico, where officials said power was out in northern Baja California's two biggest cities, home to roughly 2.5 million people. The region is home to some 6 million people, though it was impossible to say exactly how many had lost power. By early Friday, energy had been restored to more than some 930,000 users, according to combined tallies provided by officials in Arizona, California and Mexico. Power officials urged people to turn off their air conditioners and wait a bit once the electricity comes back on to avoid a surge that creates another power outage. Two reactors at a nuclear power plant along the coast went offline after losing electricity, but officials said there was no danger to the public. Authorities quickly ruled out any sabotage or, in the anxious days leading up to the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 attacks, any suggestion of terrorism. "This was not a deliberate act. The employee was just switching out a piece of equipment that was problematic," said Daniel Froetscher, an APS vice president. It's possible that extreme heat in the region also may have caused some problems with the transmission lines, one expert said. Many minor traffic accidents occurred as the outage caused mayhem on streets without stoplights during rush hour. Leah Walden, 59, said she saw about five fender-bender crashes on one trip out. Rosa Maria Gonzales, a spokeswoman with the Imperial Irrigation District in California's sizzling eastern desert, was less enthusiastic - temperatures were well into triple-digit territory when the power went out. "It feels like you're in an oven and you can't escape," she said. The blackout extended south of the border to Tijuana, Mexicali and other cities in Mexico's Baja California state, which are connected to the U.S. power grid. Police on both sides sent in re-enforcements to prevent looting and other crimes. In Tijuana, people wandered out of their hot homes into the street to cool off while restaurants scrambled for ice to save perishable food. A backup system allowed officials to continue operating border crossings from Arizona to California. Aside from clogged freeways, San Diego commuters also had to deal with the shutdown of the trolley system that shuttles thousands of commuters every day. Trains were also stopped in Los Angeles because there was no power to run the lights, gates, bells and traffic control signals. The outage came more than eight years after a more severe blackout in 2003 darkened a large swath of the Northeast and Midwest. More than 50 million people were affected in that outage. -- SPA
