A two-hour blackout on Monday afternoon brought sudden disruption to much of downtown Santa Monica.
Half of the Third Street Promenade –– including the controversial new electronic billboards on Arizona Avenue and Wilshire Blvd. –– suddenly went dark at approximately 4:30 PM.
Local businesses were forced to close while restaurant owners panicked over what to do with food that required refrigeration.
“They originally told us 30 minutes, then one hour,” J.T., owner of Silverlake Ramen, told The Sun. He added that he would likely need to discard the unsold inventory if power was not restored quickly.
A few block away, Gott’s Roadside was in just its fourth day of being open to the public. General Manager Sergio was moments away from sending his staff home when the lights came back on in most areas at 6:20 PM.
It was not immediately clear what caused the outage. The City of Santa Monica did not send out any communication to the community and the local 311 hotline was closed when we reached out for information at 6:00 PM.
Reports on social media indicate that the outage impacted areas as far north as Montana Avenue and as far south as Broadway.
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