But most claimants face an uphill battle when it comes to getting any money, an Edison spokesman and an insurance agent said.

"We have already received a number of claims from this heat wave, and it is a growing number," said Edison spokesman Steve Conroy. "And we are reviewing those claims on a case-by-case basis."

But heat-related claims have a strike against them from the start, Conroy said. That's because, under company policy, Edison is not responsible for loss or damage resulting from interruptions or shortages beyond the company's control.

"We call this heat wave an extraordinary situation and the outages resulted basically from the weather," Conroy said. "We can't control the heat."

That is not to say that Edison will not consider a claim valid based on other circumstances that occurred during the heat wave, Conroy said.

"There may have been somebody that lost service as a result of a car hitting a pole, or something that Edison may have been able to avoid or another party was responsible for," he said. "That is why we are encouraging our customers to file any claims, and we will look at each one based on its own merits."

Your homeowners' insurance won't help either, said Bob Kuhn, owner of Alandale Insurance Agency in Glendora.

"It is not an insurable loss because it is not sudden and accidental, like a fire," said Kuhn, who has been providing homeowners, auto and commercial insurance for 40 years. "Power is not guaranteed, as much as we would like it to be. We all get upset by such outages, and I happened to be one of those affected, but it is not something that can be covered from an insurance aspect."

That doesn't mean that people don't have a case against Edison for having faulty or antiquated equipment that contributed to the heat-related blackouts, Kuhn said.

"But how do you prove that?" he asked. "You have to assume that they are using older equipment as long as they can, but it would have to be an awful hard-up attorney to take up that case against Edison. You have to essentially prove that Edison was negligent."

Jimmy Lane, 59, of Glendora said he lost close to $500 in food and gas from running a generator after being without power for about four days.

"This is a wake-up call for all of us to get prepared, get a generator or arrange to share one with your neighbors," said Lane, who added he does not plan to file a claim. "Things like this can happen, and they are beyond anyone's control. Just like an earthquake, you better be prepared for the heat."

Conroy admitted many people were without power for days, but contended it was not because Edison was unprepared.

"We had about 1,300-plus transformers involved, and we had more than enough transformers on hand" to replace them, he said. "We also had crews working 24 hours a day since Saturday, when we first started seeing this transformer failure phenomenon. So there was no resource issue going on."

(Article taken from SVGTribune.com)