As Lights Go Out, Power Worries Rise

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.