A mistake on a single bundle of wires Monday cascaded into a major
blackout in and around Los Angeles, inconveniencing millions of people and
renewing questions about the vulnerability of the region's power system.
Coming one day after a purported Al Qaeda threat of attack on the city,
the midday outage pricked nerves and caused isolated incidents of panic.
Plumes of flame and smoke heightened the drama as refineries, temporarily
shut by the outage, flared off excess gases.
But backup generators, many newly installed since California's 2001 energy
crisis, kept many companies and most emergency services operating without
major disruption, and there were no reports of deaths or serious injuries
caused by the blackout.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the city-owned utility,
said the outage occurred when workers cut through wires while installing a
monitoring system at an electrical transmitting station in Toluca Lake.
The mistake rippled through the electrical grid, threatening to overload
another transmission station and two electrical generating plants: the
Scattergood generating station south of Los Angeles International Airport
and the Haynes generating station near Long Beach.
The DWP shut down the generating facilities to avoid damage, sharply
reducing the amount of power available to the city. That caused blackouts
in neighborhoods across the city, with heavy concentrations in parts of
the San Fernando Valley, South Los Angeles and the downtown area. All of
Burbank's 52,000 customers and half of Glendale's 80,000 also lost power.
Both cities' electrical systems are linked to the DWP.
"This strikes me as something under the category of unbelievably bad luck,
where you cut one line and have that kind of cascading effect," said Bob
Finkelstein, executive director of the Utility Reform Network in San
Francisco, a consumer advocacy group.
"One DWP worker is going to feel really, really bad for a long time."
The automated system workers were installing was meant to detect surges or
drops in voltage, said Ed Miller, the DWP's director of power systems,
operations and maintenance.
"They cut a bundle of wires," Miller said. "The supposition is that by
cutting them together, they created a short that triggered the circuit
breakers." Miller said cutting wires one by one might have avoided an
electrical short.
Ironically, the system the work crew was trying to install would have
identified the power problem much more quickly, Miller said. It would be
able to "decipher just what had happened." As it happened, DWP engineers
needed an hour to determine where in the system the outage began.
An official with the union that represents DWP workers charged that,
regardless of whether lines were cut, the real cause of the outage was the
DWP's decision to test the new relay system in the middle of the day,
rather than at night when power loads would have been lower but costs
would have been higher because of overtime.
"They are too cheap to pay overtime, so they are testing on a full load at
1 in the afternoon," said Brian D'Arcy, business manager for the
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 18.
"You clearly don't test the relay at one in the afternoon. If you are
cheap and stupid, this is what happens."
The DWP said such work is routinely conducted during the day.
DWP officials insisted the system had worked as it is supposed to
shutting down and causing a temporary inconvenience to avoid widespread
permanent damage. Miller compared the shutdown to the way a circuit
breaker turns off power to a house to prevent overheated lines from
causing a deadly fire.
At the same time, however, Miller said he planned to investigate whether
the ability of a single incident to black out half the power supply
indicated a need for major changes in the way the city's electrical system
is configured. "If I decide I need a differently configured system, that
could take a couple of years," he said.
"I'm very proud of my people. There was no system damage, and nobody was
hurt," said Miller.
"The system is not fragile," he added. "We have a very strong system."
Others were less sanguine.
"As an engineer, it's unnerving that one
individual act can cut power to hundreds of thousands of customers," said
Los Angeles City Councilman Tony Cardenas, chairman of a panel overseeing
the DWP.
Cardenas, who was stuck in traffic on Van Nuys Boulevard when traffic
signals went out, said he would demand to know whether the outage betrayed
a broader vulnerability for the city's electrical system.
I've been told over and over that this kind of vulnerability doesn't
exist," Cardenas said.
Mary Nichols, who heads UCLA's Institute of the Environment and was
appointed last month as a DWP commissioner, said she, too, had "questions
and concerns" about "why the system isn't more resilient and why there
isn't more redundancy built into it."
And a spokeswoman for Cal-ISO, the independent organization that oversees
the statewide electrical grid, said the incident was "disconcerting."
Stephanie McCorkle criticized officials of the DWP, which is independent
of Cal-ISO's system, for not being more forthcoming with information about
the outage, saying the DWP did not officially alert the rest of the
statewide grid until 3:45 p.m., more than three hours after the outage
began.
"There was no coordination, and that concerns us," she said.
Although unseasonably cool weather makes the electrical grid less
susceptible to widespread failures because of decreased energy demands,
McCorkle said she was not sure whether hot weather could have caused the
DWP outage to spread.
The outage occurred at 12:37 p.m., cutting power to 750,000 homes and
businesses, or about 2 million people, DWP officials said. It struck about
half of the DWP's service area. Other parts of the region, most of which
is served by Southern California Edison, were not affected.
Power was restored to 90% of the downed customers within 90 minutes, DWP
officials said.
Although there apparently were no major problems caused by the outage,
there was no shortage of anxiety and discomfort.
Most of the city's 4,300 traffic signals were knocked out, either going
dark or flashing red. In one instance, along Olympic Boulevard near
Beverly Hills, motorist Beto Ramos said all the lights turned green.
"I had a green light, everyone had green lights," Ramos said. "No one knew
what to do. We're so used to stop, go, stop, go. To see nothing but green
lights was real weird, like all of society had paused."
State officials have been pushing cities to install low-power stoplights
that can be equipped with backup power to prevent outages. So far, San
Francisco has adopted the lights, but Los Angeles has not because of the
cost, said Rob Schlichting of the state energy commission.
Some commuter trains were delayed about 15 minutes during the lunch hour
after power surges were detected by the Metropolitan Transportation
Authority's rail operations center. Transit buses also were delayed by
traffic congestion.
Workers in high-rise office buildings in downtown Los Angeles faced twin
inconveniences: Elevators stopped, forcing people to either stay in their
offices or descend many flights of stairs. And air conditioning shut down,
turning plush offices into carpeted saunas.
"It got hot real quick in here," said Wells Fargo employee Sean Maddox,
stuck in the 60-story Aon building.
Another tool of modern life high-speed Internet connections was
knocked out in some parts of the city because of the outage. Patti
Rockenwegner, a spokesperson for Comcast, which provides cable and
broadband Internet service to about 500,000 customers in Southern
California, said some customers in Hollywood and South Los Angeles lost
service for about 40 minutes when the outage tripped fuses.
Hours after power was restored, however, some customers in other parts of
the city, including the Fairfax and Mid-Wilshire areas, were reporting
that Comcast lines remained out of service.
The outage occurred one day after the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, and a day after a Southern California man suspected of
having ties to Al Qaeda warned of an impending terror attack on Los
Angeles and Melbourne, Australia.
Although Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William J. Bratton
insisted that they knew of no "credible threat" to the city, many
Angelenos wondered, if only momentarily, whether the outage was the result
of a terrorist attack.
"It is the easiest way to trip up our routine, [to] cut the power," said
Matt Jarrette, who found himself in gridlock as he drove to work at the
nonprofit California Assoc. of Physician Groups downtown. "The day after
Sept. 11 it is disconcerting."
The scene near harbor-area refineries was disconcerting in a different
way. As of 5 p.m. Monday, regional air regulators had received more than
40 complaints about smoke and stack-top flames from residents in
Wilmington, Harbor City, Long Beach and other areas in southern Los
Angeles County, said Sam Atwood, spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality
Management District. Six inspectors were dispatched to investigate the
complaints and the mandatory shutdown reports from the refineries.
When refineries lose power, they release built-up pressure by sending oil
products up their tall stacks, where it is burned off by stack-top flares,
producing flames and heavy smoke. The burn-off is a safety mechanism that
prevents flammable fuels from spreading, refinery officials said.
The 200-plus students at the Harbor Teacher Prep Academy in Wilmington
were kept in their classrooms or moved to the cafeteria until the end of
the school day as a precaution after school officials detected a noxious
smell from a nearby oil refinery, said Los Angeles Unified School District
spokeswoman Susan Cox. The school is on the Los Angeles Harbor Community
College campus.
Refinery officials said the shutdowns were temporary and were not expected
to affect Southern California gasoline supplies or prices.
The disruptions might well have been worse but for the proliferation of
backup generators in the years since 2001, when the energy crisis
threatened the state with frequent outages.
There has been an increase of several hundred generators in the region
since then, according to the air quality district, which issues permits
for generators.
Hospitals are required by state law to maintain backup generators, and
many in Los Angeles were forced to switch to backup power Monday.
Generators also allowed operations to continue uninterrupted at Van Nuys
Airport and Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, both of which were affected by
the outage. Van Nuys serves private aircraft, while Burbank handles
commercial flights as well as private planes. Los Angeles International
Airport did not lose power.
Few Los Angeles schools have backup generators, but many have backup
batteries to power emergency lights and alarms. Those systems were
triggered Monday at several Los Angeles campuses.
New campuses that are part of the district's ambitious building program
are being equipped with backup generators, officials said.
Parents seeking word of the situation in the schools may have been taken
aback by the message on the L.A. Unified emergency phone line, however.
Callers who dialed Monday seeking word about the outage heard the
following: "Topanga Elementary and Wonderland Elementary will be closed
Tuesday Jan. 11 because of heavy rain. All other LAUSD campuses will be
open as usual
. "
*
Contributing to the coverage of the blackout were Times
staff writers Fred Alvarez, Sandy Banks, Patricia Ward Beiderman, Andrew
Blankstein, Nancy Cleeland, Frank Clifford, Marla Cone, Jean Guccione,
Carla Hall, Erica Hayasaki, Duke Helfand, Daniel Hernandez, Matt Lait,
Marc Lifsher, Sara Lin, Caitlin Liu, Dave McKibben, Jean Merl, John
O'Dell, Jennifer Oldham, Charles Ornstein, Lance Pugmire, Sam Quinones,
Joel Rubin, H.G. Reza, Lisa Richardson, Louis Sahagun, Catherine Saillant,
Jesus Sanchez, Beth Shuster, Larry B. Stammer, Rebecca Trounson, Dan
Weikel and Richard Winton.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
To subscribe or visit go to:
http://www.latimes.com/