At about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday night most of Mariposa County and Yosemite National Park lost all of its electrical power from Pacific Gas & Electric.

According to Nicole Liebet, a spokesperson for PG&E, “We had a sustained outage that affected 12,175 customers in the area of Mariposa, Indian Flat, Bear Valley, and Yosemite National Park.”

Liebet said that at around 10:30 p.m. power was restored to 10,000 customers, and the other 2,175 customers had the lights back on by 11:30 p.m.

“Our first response was to restore power and provide safety to those affected by the outage,” Liebet said. “Today (Wednesday) we will fully investigate the cause of the out- age,” Liebet said. “Today (Wednesday) we will fully investigate the cause of the outage to prevent future events.”

Liebet said PG&E repair personnel believe the outage originated at the Exchequer power house. That’s the same origination point that PG&E blamed back in the middle of January when power to the same area was interrupted for an extended period of time. In that outage, which also happened on a Tuesday, power was lost by 9,980 customers.

The main power source for the County comes from the Exchequer power house. Last January Liebet said, ““This is not a situation related specifically to Exchequer.” The following Friday, Jan. 15, PG&E shut off power to the County at 11 p.m. to repair the damaged equipment at Exchequer. That power was restored early Saturday morning.

Local officials expressed concern at that time that there was not a secondary power source serving the County.

Wednesday morning, Liebet was not able to confirm that a back-up power source had been established to “back feed” the County’s power lines in the event of another widespread outage.

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