Equipment Failures

Concerned about hazards posed by underground electrical vaults, the Public Utilities Commission is moving toward tightening regulations for inspections of the storage units--some of which go unexamined for years. The proposal, under consideration at the time of a July 12 explosion that killed three Pasadena city employees, is expected to be adopted by the commission this fall. It mandates inspection schedules for the vaults and requires utilities to keep records of the inspections.

It's the most expensive fighter jet ever built. Yet the F-22 Raptor has never seen a day of combat, and its future is clouded by a government safety investigation that has grounded the jet for months. The fleet of 158 F-22s has been sidelined since May 3, after more than a dozen incidents in which oxygen was cut off to pilots, making them woozy. The malfunction is suspected of contributing to at least one fatal accident. At an estimated cost of $412 million each, the F-22s amount to about $65 billion sitting on the tarmac.

The fatal collision on Friday evening between a large airliner and a small plane on the ground at Los Angeles International Airport, one of the nation's busiest, comes as no surprise to aviation experts who have been issuing warnings about dangerously congested runway conditions nationwide. "We know that the two planes did collide on the (ground)," said Elly Brekke, a regional spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

It's a situation that thousands of Angelenos have faced. You're running late. The street is jammed with cars. There's just one spot left, but as you pull in the meter flashes that irritating message: Fail, Fail, Fail. Should you risk a ticket? Turns out in L.A. you're in the clear -- the city's meter enforcers aren't supposed to write tickets for parking at a failed meter. But that wasn't what Councilman Tom LaBonge, who represents portions of Los Feliz, Silver Lake and Hollywood, was hearing.

An underground equipment failure Friday at La Habra Fashion Square caused 1,200 customers--including a local hospital--to lose electrical power for almost two hours, police said. The blackout at 9:15 a.m. created headaches for residents, banks, stores and restaurants in the half-square-mile area bounded by Beach Boulevard on the west, Lambert Road on the north, Idaho Street on the east and Imperial Highway on the south, according to La Habra police spokeswoman Cindy Knapp.

Water officials said Tuesday that pumps designed to push water to the upper reaches of a hillside Yorba Linda neighborhood failed during a Nov. 15 firestorm, possibly explaining why firefighters were forced to abandon the area and let homes burn after fire hydrants went dry. The disclosure came four days after Orange County fire officials blamed the loss of as many as five homes in the neighborhood on lack of water from fire hydrants.

An equipment failure at an electrical receiving station knocked out power to a one-square-mile area around Northridge Fashion Center at dusk Friday, trapping a woman in an elevator and causing droves of disappointed shoppers to head home early. The outage, which was first reported at 5:30 p.m.

NASA lost its $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter because spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements when exchanging vital data before the craft was launched, space agency officials said Thursday.

Two schoolchildren died Wednesday morning when a school bus was rammed near downtown Los Angeles by a malfunctioning rod protruding from a city trash truck, only hours after the truck had been cited for mechanical problems. The dead children were identified as Francisco Mata and Brian Serrano, both 8-year-old third-graders. Two other children were injured in the accident, one critically, in what school officials called the first fatal bus accident in the Los Angeles district's history.

Every time a patient receives a CT scan, a mundane array of numbers appears on a computer screen before a technician. The numbers include the radiation dose. "It's in your face on the screen," said Dr. Donald Rucker, chief medical officer for Siemens, a manufacturer of CT scanners. Beginning in February 2008, each time a patient at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center received a CT brain perfusion scan -- a state-of-the-art procedure used to diagnose strokes -- the dose displayed would have been eight times higher than normal.

An estimated 117,000 Californians haven't received their unemployment checks -- some for more than a month -- because of what state officials blame on an archaic computer system. The people whose checks have been held up are among the neediest of the unemployed -- those who have been out of work so long that their benefits have expired. Under legislation signed by President Obama on Nov. 6, they were supposed to get unemployment checks for an additional 14 weeks or more. State Employment Development Department officials say they are doing everything they can to issue the checks, even postponing some staff furloughs to deal with the demand for services.

University of California officials have extended the application period for undergraduate admissions after a computer slowdown kept some students from filing their online applications in time for Monday night's deadline. The new deadline is 11:59 p.m. Tuesday. Susan Wilbur, UC's director of undergraduate admissions, said her office is investigating the cause of the computerized malfunction that at least temporarily blocked some panicked last-minute filers from submitting applications on Sunday and Monday nights.

Hundreds of flights around the country were canceled or delayed Thursday after a communications failure at a Federal Aviation Administration computer center, leaving passengers scrambling to revise travel plans. The glitch, which occurred about 5 a.m. Eastern time, prevented airlines from electronically entering their flight plans into an FAA computer in Salt Lake City that air traffic controllers nationwide rely on. FAA officials blamed a failed circuit board in a networking system that is used to transfer flight data.

NASA scientists said Thursday that they had come up with a plan to free the stalled rover Spirit from its Martian sand trap but also warned that the plan might not work. If it doesn't, the popular robot could finally reach its end. Rover managers will send the first in a new set of computer commands on Monday in an effort to maneuver Spirit out of the fluffy, loose soil where it's been stuck for the last six months. In a teleconference briefing for reporters, the Mars rover team said it was "optimistic" that Spirit would be able to resume its peregrinations across the Martian surface.

The unusual case of the missing Sidekick data may be nearing its conclusion. Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that most or all users of its Sidekick mobile device might indeed see their lost data again. The announcement came after worries that users' contacts, notes, photos and other virtual property may have been lost for good when company servers failed. "We plan to begin restoring users' personal data as soon as possible," Roz Ho, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Premium Mobile Experiences, said in a statement, adding that the company now believes the outage affected a minority of Sidekick users.

Every time a patient receives a CT scan, a mundane array of numbers appears on a computer screen before a technician. The numbers include the radiation dose. "It's in your face on the screen," said Dr. Donald Rucker, chief medical officer for Siemens, a manufacturer of CT scanners. Beginning in February 2008, each time a patient at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center received a CT brain perfusion scan -- a state-of-the-art procedure used to diagnose strokes -- the dose displayed would have been eight times higher than normal.

It's a situation that thousands of Angelenos have faced. You're running late. The street is jammed with cars. There's just one spot left, but as you pull in the meter flashes that irritating message: Fail, Fail, Fail. Should you risk a ticket? Turns out in L.A. you're in the clear -- the city's meter enforcers aren't supposed to write tickets for parking at a failed meter. But that wasn't what Councilman Tom LaBonge, who represents portions of Los Feliz, Silver Lake and Hollywood, was hearing.

The Nasdaq Stock Market's computerized systems shut down near the close of Tuesday's record trading day, in a failure that angered traders and gave a black eye to Nasdaq--which bills itself as "the stock market for the digital world." Nasdaq's trade-reporting and quotation systems--the eyes and ears of the all-electronic market--crashed nationwide at 3:41 p.m. Eastern time and stayed out until 3:57 p.m., three minutes before the close of the regular trading day.

The number of major water main breaks in Los Angeles has more than doubled this month compared with the same period last year, Department of Water and Power officials said Monday. Since Sept. 1, the agency has recorded 43 breaks requiring significant repairs, officials said. There were 21 such breaks in September 2008, 17 in September 2007 and 13 in September 2006. Despite recent dramatic images of major water main breaks, including a 10-foot geyser of water and mud in Studio City and a sinkhole that swallowed half a fire engine in Valley Village, leaks and ruptures are a routine occurrence in the city's aging network of pipes, officials said.

Underground water pipes in Los Angeles have suffered significantly more "major blowouts" in the last three months, officials confirmed Tuesday after analyzing dozens of ruptures, some of which flooded streets, damaged vehicles and buildings and created a sinkhole so big that it almost swallowed a firetruck. And the city's engineers don't know why. It could be fluctuating temperatures. It could be a statistical anomaly. It could be something else. "It's strange," said William Robertson, general manager of the Bureau of Street Services, which repaves the ruined roads after the water recedes.