Massive blackout affects California, Arizona, Mexico

A major power outage knocked out electricity to more than 2 million people in California, Arizona and Mexico on Thursday, bringing San Diego and Tijuana to a standstill and leaving people sweltering in the late-summer heat in the surrounding desert.

Two nuclear reactors were offline after losing electricity, but officials said there was no danger to the public or workers. FBI officials ruled out terrorism while power plant authorities struggled to find the cause of the outage that started shortly before 4 p.m. PDT.

San Diego bore the brunt of the blackout; most of the nation's eighth-largest city was darkened. All outgoing flights from San Diego's Lindbergh Field were grounded and police stations were using generators to accept emergency calls across the area.

The trolley system that shuttles thousands of commuters every day was shut down and freeways were clogged at rush hour. Trains were stopped in Los Angeles, an Amtrak spokesman said, because there was no power to run the lights, gates, bells and traffic control signals.

Police directed traffic at intersections where signals stopped working.

In Tijuana, people wandered out of their hot homes into the street to cool off while restaurants scrambled for ice to save perishable food.

The outage extended from southern parts of Orange County to San Diego to Yuma, Arizona. It also affected cities south of the border across much of the state of northern Baja. Border officials said crossings into California are open.

"It feels like you're in an oven and you can't escape," said Rosa Maria Gonzales, a spokeswoman with the Imperial Irrigation District in California's sizzling eastern desert. She said it was about 115 degrees when the power went out for about 150,000 of its customers.

In San Diego, Blake Albert Jordan, 20, saw a trolley come to a screeching halt as he neared the platform. Dozens of passengers emptied onto the tracks when the doors opened.

Jordan said he called about 20 friends and family to pick him up in San Diego's Mission Valley, where he was visiting a friend, to his home in suburban Lemon Grove. None offered to venture on the roads.

A transmitter line between Arizona and California was severed, said Mike Niggli, chief operating officer ofSan Diego Gas & Electric Co., causing the outage. The extreme heat in some areas also may have caused some problems with the lines.

"Essentially we have two connections from the rest of the world: One of from the north and one is to the east. Both connections are severed," Niggli said.

Power officials don't know what severed the line.

Niggli said he suspects the system was "overwhelmed by too many outages in too many places."

Niggli said relief was on its way, slowly. He said his 1.4 million customers may be without power until Friday.

Two reactors at the San Onofre nuclear power plant went offline at 3:38 p.m. as they are programmed to do when there is a disturbance in the power grid, said Charles Coleman, a spokesman from Southern California Edison. He said there was no danger to the public or to workers there.

The outage came more than eight years after a more severe black out in 2003 darkened a large swath of the Northeast and Midwest. More than 50 million people were affected in that outage.

In Arizona, about half of Yuma County had power again Thursday evening after losing it earlier. Yuma County has about 200,000 residents and a little under half live in the city of Yuma.

"It's 113 degrees right now outside," said Yuma city spokesman Greg Hyland, who was sitting in the dark, answering calls.

Five hundred to 2,000 SoCal Edison customers in southern Orange County and Riverside County are currently without power and there is no estimate for when power will be restored, Coleman said.

Capt. Mike Stone of the Orange County Fire Authority said several people were trapped and rescued at the tony Ritz Carlton hotel in south Orange County, Stone said.

In southern Orange County, the sheriff's department dispatched deputies to busy intersections because traffic lights were out, said John McDonald, a sheriff's spokesman. Outages were confirmed in San Clemente, SanJuan Capistrano and Laguna Hills, he said.

Traffic was backed up in some areas, and the Orange County Register reported that fire crews were dealing with numerous calls of people being trapped in elevators.