A power failure Sunday left 900 Murieta North customers without electricity, many of them for 12 hours or more.

The outage, which began at 12:30 a.m., meant a land-office business for MarShaTes and the Country Club, as Murietans who awoke to a cold coffee pot in a cold house looked for a warm place to get breakfast.

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District said the problem was an underground line on Murieta Parkway near the lower Guadalupe Drive.

A SMUD crew arrived in the middle of the night and the last of the trucks didn't leave the community until Sunday evening.

The fault was located just before 5 a.m., SMUD said, but the work was delayed because the line was buried unusually deep. By 9 a.m., the crew had dug six feet but they estimated it would take another four or five feet of digging, which raised safety concerns and required equipment to shore up the hole's walls to keep them from collapsing and burying workers.

"The cable is really deep," said Gary Crews, SMUD foreman on the scene. "That's our problem right now. ... Normally we'd be down to the wire and replacing it by now."

He said the underground cable was believed to be from 1974, and such lines have a life expectancy of 20 to 25 years.

By 1 p.m., the crew was nine or 10 feet into the ground and working on the broken line. Workers estimated it would be until 5 p.m. before the job was complete.

SMUD troubleshooters were working to reroute power to the community, and some homes saw electricity return during the morning hours and afternoon.

The line at MarShaTes was out the door.

Ensconced on a sofa at MarShaTes in Murieta Plaza at midmorning, reading the paper and enjoying coffee and danish, 16-year residents Jim and Barbara Stabenau said it was the longest power outage they'd experienced here.

Hearing that it could be a while before power was restored, Jim Stabenau said, "We're going to have breakfast and go to an early movie."

Wayne and Jayne Kuntz, who stop at MarShaTes every Sunday after church, said it was more crowded than usual. They added Murieta Village, unaffected by the long-term power outage, had its own problems Saturday night, when power went out for 90 minutes to two hours.

At the Country Club, members formed a line at the omelet station. The outage was the primary topic of conversation throughout the club's dining and social areas.

Marklin Brown was at Plaza Foods, piling fireplace logs into his truck. He had enough batteries for his flashlights, Brown said, but he was concerned about keeping the house warm.

By the afternoon, with the hole nine feet deep or more, SMUD worker Joe Dixon needed help getting out of the reinforced hole in the median on Murieta Parkway.