Power back on for nearly 15,000 Merced homes, businesses. Here’s what happened

Power has been restored to almost 15,000 Merced homes, businesses and schools after an outage Friday morning believed to have been caused by a car hitting a utility pole, officials said.

PG&E started restoring power at 9:59 a.m. and finished full restoration at 10:11 a.m., spokesman Denny Boyles said.

The area of the outage spanned 14,589 customers in large swaths south of Olive Avenue and areas south of Highway 99 and Highway 140, according to an outage map.

The substation-level outage occurred around 7:30 a.m.

“We have confirmed two separate car-versus-pole accidents in the area, one of which is being investigated as the cause of this outage,” said Boyles, noting that the cause was still under investigation.

Usually, power outages are confined to distribution lines within a city where the voltage is stepped down, causing discomfort to less homes, Boyles said.

But this outage affected a substation transmission, a higher voltage line that connects cities. “It’s rare,” Boyles said.

This story was originally published January 10, 2020 at 9:37 AM.