With power now fully restored across a swath of southern California and Arizona, many CU managers were rejoicing Friday that their disaster emergency plans worked well for hours following the Thursday afternoon outage. 

The blackout forced CUs to activate generator backup systems and "we're happy to say that our emergency disaster plans were implemented without a hitch," declared Tum Vongsawad, chief operating officer of the $5.2 billion San Diego County CU, the city's largest.

All 28 of SDCCU's branches were fully operational "at 9 a.m. this morning as we saw the power come on about midnight," said Vongsawad.  The CU said it experienced few calls from members last night as the CU did extend hours for its call center past the 5 p.m. closing time.