Villa Park residents press Edison on repeated public-safety power shutoffs, company outlines mitigations

Southern California Edison gave a technical briefing and took questions at a Villa Park town hall after multiple public-safety power shutoffs (PSPS) left parts of the city without electricity for extended periods this winter, but residents said company explanations and recent equipment work have not resolved the problem.

Cynthia Quimby, government relations manager for Southern California Edison, told the meeting the decision to cut power “is not something that we take lightly” and described PSPS as a “tool of last resort” used when weather and vegetation conditions raise the risk of ignitions.

Quimby said Edison bases PSPS choices on a fire potential index, on-the-ground field observations and wind forecasts from company meteorologists and a private weather-station network. She said the company runs incident-management teams during events and that restoration requires field patrols and authorizations that can take “1 hour” to “up to 8 hours.”

Why this matters: residents described repeated outages — one speaker said they were without power for nearly seven days in January and multiple shorter outages earlier — disrupting households, businesses and schools and prompting neighbors to consider whole-house generators. City leaders pressed Edison for clearer timelines and concrete fixes.

Edison presentations and resident exchanges

At the start of the town hall, SCE described the scale of its territory and assets: a service area the company described as about 50,000 square…