Sacramento goes dark in power outage, Legislature delayed

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A power outage in Sacramento on Thursday that left much of the city’s downtown area in the dark delayed the start of California’s Legislature.

Utility crews worked to replace a transformer and the outage delayed legislators from starting work for about half an hour.

The Sacramento Municipal Utilities District reported 650 customers were without power during the morning, a figure that likely represented thousands of people because multiple high-rise office buildings and the state Capitol were impacted. Many downtown traffic lights went dark.

The state Legislature had been scheduled to meet at 9 a.m. The outage delayed the start of the state Assembly until 9:30 a.m. The state Senate planned to meet in a legislative committee room in another building. The power was restored by late morning.