Equipment Failures

Improperly adjusted brakes and the driver's failure to use a low enough gear apparently were major factors in the July crash of a chartered school bus near Palm Springs that killed four teen-age Girl Scouts and three adults, a California Highway Patrol officer said Thursday.

Investigators on Friday officially blamed defective brakes for a bus accident that killed seven people on a Girl Scout tour here last month, but said the driver might have prevented the crash had he used a lower gear while descending the steep grade where the wreck occurred. If driver Richard A.

The massive phone outages that swamped telephone systems in Los Angeles, San Francisco and several Eastern cities this summer could have been avoided--or at least minimized--if local Bell telephone companies had shared information about technical problems, federal investigators said.

About 400 riders were safely evacuated from a Metro Red Line subway tunnel near downtown Los Angeles last weekend after equipment failures caused a four-car train to come to a virtual standstill, officials said Tuesday. The Saturday night evacuation was called after a frustrated passenger pulled open an emergency door and riders began wandering out into the tunnel between stations. Alarmed, Red Line employees shut down power to that portion of the subway to prevent electrocutions.

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.

Two jumbo jets approaching Los Angeles International Airport on a collision course came within about two miles of each over--half the authorized minimum distance--when air traffic control radios failed this week, union and federal officials say.

A state-of-the-art airport radar system in Gardena broke down for an hour Monday, forcing air traffic controllers at John Wayne Airport to switch to visual procedures to guide arriving and departing aircraft. It was the second equipment failure in four months to affect the Orange County airport and another in a rash of radar-tracking system problems nationwide. "It's become an epidemic," said Howard Rifas, a spokesman for the Orange County chapter of the air traffic controllers union.

A construction crane snapped in two and tumbled 19 stories Tuesday, sweeping three workers to their deaths and crushing two passers-by under a rain of debris during the morning rush hour in downtown San Francisco. At least 21 people were injured, four seriously, including one 12-year-old boy hit in the head while waiting for a bus. Rescuers combed the debris for five construction workers believed missing, but they were later located unharmed.

Tiffany Morrison was trying to be a fun mom. The Lake Isabella resident had agreed to take her two daughters and their three friends to Magic Mountain's Hurricane Harbor. Unfortunately, the Grapevine killed her station wagon. "This isn't fun. It's the middle of July, there's five kids with me and the car stops running," said Morrison, as the girls tried in vain to convince her that their amusement park adventure could be salvaged.

The state Public Utilities Commission is blaming poor design, construction and maintenance by the city's Community Redevelopment Agency and its contractors and inadequate oversight by the commission's own staff for last year's fatal crash of the Angels Flight cable railway. Leon Praport, 83, a survivor of the Holocaust, was killed, and his wife and six other people were injured on Feb.