Southern California Edison officials are trying to learn from a massive power failure in Santa Monica that crippled some companies for more than two days.

To keep it from happening again, the utility has decided to upgrade systems in the area.

The Oct. 26 incident was caused by a failure in a component that connected above-ground wires with an underground vault at the corner of Sixth Street and Colorado Avenue.

That caused a literal meltdown in the vault, taking out 11 separate circuits. The average power failure generally involves just one circuit.

“In my 22-year career, I have only seen a couple of instances where I have seen this much (damage),” said Mark Olson, Edison’s region manager.

Some firms could do little but shuffle papers during the outage.

“We are actually in a great building with lots of windows, so we caught up on our filing,” said Karen Diehl, managing associate at Casey Sayre & Williams, a public relations firm located in the blacked-out area.

“By Friday afternoon (Oct. 27) at 2 p.m., when it was evident that nothing was going to happen and we exhausted all productive activities, we sent people home,” she said.

The early-morning outage initially affected 15,000 customers, or about a third of the city, but by the start of the next business day (Oct. 27) that number had decreased to about 2,000 customers, between Colorado Avenue and Broadway, and from Lincoln Boulevard to Third Street.

It took until the next day to bring most of those customers on line, while some 250 others were put on mobile generators by the utility and were not taken off until a week later.

The city’s high-tech cluster in the Olympic Boulevard area was not affected. But Santa Monica Place, the large indoor mall at the south end of the Third Street Promenade, was down for two days, as was POP Sound, a post-production sound studio on Arizona Avenue.

That forced the studio to divert clients to other studios, where it was forced to book space.

That was until the business took matters into its own hands and simply got their own generator on the second day of the outage.

The massive failure of the vault required the utility to replace 54,000 feet of high-voltage conductor and 125 high-voltage connections.