After a half-dozen local Southern California Edison customers aired grievances Tuesday to the Santa Clarita City Council, city officials said the city has been in talks with the utility for years over infrastructure concerns now being blamed for the Public Safety Power Shut-offs.  The controversial program preemptively shuts off power to areas particularly vulnerable to wind damage in order to prevent wind-damaged equipment from starting a fire.   Irate residents from across the Santa Clarita Valley say the program has left their home or business without power for days, even as the winds have lessened considerably since last week.  In accordance with its policy throughout the windstorms, SCE officials declined to address any of the specific claims, including an assertion made by Councilwoman Laurene Weste on Tuesday as to why some east-side residents consistently lost power during the outages. They referred questions on outages to a frequently asked questions page on the utility’s decision-making process, at bit.ly/3WnkplD.  “This is an abominable abuse of our public,” Weste said. “Mayor (Bill) Miranda and I met with Edison and had a couple of hard-hitting meetings in 2021, and they started hardening the areas and changing out what they need to change out.”  She referenced specifically the residents impacted by the Hillfield Circuit in Canyon Country, some of whom spoke Tuesday, adding they know about the problem because their power is always impacted by PSPS, which garnered applause from the audience.   “When you shut off people’s power, you don’t just shut off their lights. You’re potentially shutting off their ability to maintain their food,” Weste said, adding that could cause sickness and the utility should compensate its customers as it said it would in 2021.  The City Council doesn’t have any recourse over the state-regulated utility, City Manager Ken Striplin said Tuesday night in response to residents’ anger and frustration, adding the city has about as much clout with SCE as any of the utility’s millions of other customers.    “These shut-offs are a tool that help us protect the public from hazards and emergencies that could arise due to the wind,” said Gabriela Ornelas, spokeswoman for the utility, “but I can tell you, we work quickly to get power back up and running once conditions are safe for us to do so.”   She said once the order to end a PSPS goes out, it typically takes up to eight hours for everyone’s power to be restored, because workers have to first inspect the infrastructure to make sure there was no damage.  “It is possible for that to be longer than eight hours, or shorter than eight hours,” she added, “it depends on each situation that our crews find.”  Ornelas referred questions regarding the SCV impacts of circuit hardening to a web page titled, “Circuit Upgrades Help Reduce PSPS Outages.”  The page allows residents to look up their address to see if this work could impact their outage.  The hardening issue apparently continued to impact more than just the Hillfield Circuit, according to information from the utility’s online tool, which indicates potential customer impacts to those in ZIP codes for Castaic (91310), Stevenson Ranch (91381), Valencia (91355), Newhall (91321) and Canyon Country (91351), among other areas.   The current areas still without power as of Wednesday included parts of Canyon Country, Newhall and Castaic, although also extremely frustrating to customers was SCE’s failure to let customers who were suffering from outages caused by wind damage know what’s happening. The power for those customers may take longer to restore, Ornelas said, due to the volume of service issues caused by the windstorm.  The “expedited grid-hardening work status” list that has Hillfield on it states work on hardening circuits of the Guitar Circuit, which is located off Henry Mayo Drive, will be completed by 2024. SCE customers in that area said this week they’re still frequently losing power at their businesses.   But that was better news than the list had for Canyon Country residents on the Hillfield Circuit, who are expected to have their infrastructure ready by 2027, according to SCE’s online list at bit.ly/3DXVU8g.  Ornelas said she only had regional data available for customers impacted by the outages — 98,000 were without power in its service area, including L.A., Kern, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties and outages due to either damage or a PSPS as of late Wednesday afternoon. Nearly 20,000 of those were in Los Angeles County.  “So with the shut-offs, these outages remain in effect for the duration of the wind event, and we do know that winds are in the forecast (Wednesday) and partially (Thursday),” she said Wednesday afternoon. “We know that early Thursday morning, some winds are still expected, and as those winds subside, we will be making progress toward restoring service to customers as quickly and as safely as possible.”  A fact sheet on the factors in a PSPS can be found at bit.ly/40A14jO.  The post Residents share SCE gripes with City Council   appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.