The whole county of San Diego, about 1.5 million households, is sitting in the dark. It starts at 3:30pm when the power goes off. We first believe that the construction worker next door turned it off or mistakenly hit a cable.

We decide to go pick-up our car at the detailer – what a mistake! We hit the road with everyone else, all the offices and stores closed and let their employees go home because the power is not expected to be back anytime soon – it leads to a total traffic collapse. At least we get to listen to the radio in the car and learn what happened and what to expect:

More than 1.4 million San Diego Gas & Electric customers (households) are without power, with millions of people affected by the outage. All other service providers around the state have power. The California Independent System Operator is helping to bring power back on, an SDG&E official said.

“We expect power to be out well into the night and into tomorrow in some areas,” a spokesman for the utility said shortly before 5 p.m.

A transmitter line between Arizona and California was severed, causing both major connections in the region, causing the outage, the representative said. The extreme heat in some areas also may have caused some problems with the lines, according to SDG&E.

“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,” said the SDG&E official, who also noted that the outage had prompted the San Onofre Nuclear plant to be taken offline as well.

Source: nbcnews.com

So, we are sitting in the living room with two candles on for at least a little bit of light and we will probably hit the pillow a bit earlier than usual tonight – what can you do without power and the batteries of our laptops will not last too long anymore either.

Note from the following day: power came back at 1am, so we are back to normal again!