One power plant failure should never cause an outage, even in a case of peak demand.....Reputable companies do all their planned maintenance outside of peak summertime months. But then, when ENRON was in existence, they sometimes ORDERED utilities to shut down plants to game the system and charge ridiculous spot rates.
So, while not being privy to the particulars, it sounds like a comedy of errors to me...In my State Consolidated Edison (Con Ed) in NYC basically caused both the 1965 and, what was it? the 1971 outages - that case the CEO stating ONE WEEK BEFORE that they were in the best shape ever to deal with another outage....
(The second outage was worse than the 1965 one, since other utilities got smart this time, and disconnected as soon as they saw trouble - memories of Con Ed's incompetence only being 6 years old.)..
The CEO THOUGHT he was in great shape since he had gas turbines all over the borough... Unfortunately, the 220 kv oil insulated underground cables were pressurized by OIL PUMPS running off the standard network, which incidentally failed. So they had all this emergency electricity with no where to send it since the unpressurized cables would instantly short out.
The second outage was much much longer, and since most of their powerplants at the time ran on #6 fuel oil, the boilers got cold, so the steam heaters didn't work since there was no steam, and the emergency electric heaters didn't work since there was no electricity. #6 fuel oil solidifies at room temperature in the pipe.
The big question is: Why do they pay idiot CEO's and application engineers so much money, when they obviously can't think through the simplest scenario?
I'm sure California has equally idiotic great brains.