Cellphone service was facing challenges Tuesday as the Franklin Fire burned in Malibu.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said the fire destroyed some cell phone towers in the area, affecting service. The extent of the outage was not immediately clear, but people in the area reported difficulty making calls.
David Eisenhauer said there were several outages in the fire area Tuesday morning, some for firefighter safety and some for widespread public safety outages that were planned to Limit potential fire sparks from utility equipment, a Southern California Edison spokesman said.
He gave no details about the power outages surrounding the fire. Across the region, more than 40,000 customers had planned outages due to high winds, about a quarter of them in Los Angeles County. Another 200,000 are considering closing.
It’s unclear how many such outages have occurred in Malibu.
Officials, who have been bracing for high winds in Santa Ana, said Monday that more than 350,000 customers from Kern to San Diego counties could lose power during planned safety outages.
