Darkness at the break of noon

Danette Goulet

NEWPORT BEACH -- Monday was the day the lights went out at Ensign.

Ensign Intermediate School was one of 795 Southern California Edison

customers to find itself in the dark just after 1 p.m. Monday.

“Oh yeah, we’re in the dark,” said Principal Mike McGuire at about

1:30 p.m., speaking literally of course.

The power outage, which lasted for a little more than half an hour,

was caused by a broken utility pole that left a wire down at Pirate Road

and Cliff Drive, said Kim Scheer, a spokeswoman for Edison.

Although the power company is unsure what exactly happened, Scheer

said, they do know it affected all customers east of Newport Boulevard,

south of 15th Street, west of Signal Road and north of Coast Highway.

Nearby Newport Harbor High School managed to escape the mess -- the

other side of the street was in darkness.

That’s twice in less than two weeks that a school has lost power, and

neither outage was due to the energy crisis.

A blown transformer left TeWinkle Middle School in Costa Mesa with

only half its lights working two weeks ago.

After trying to work in the dark for a while, school officials gave in

and called it a day at TeWinkle at around 10:45 a.m.

School officials at Ensign entertained no such thoughts.

“We were conducting business around here as usual -- just without

computers,” McGuire said.