Mystery of LAX Outage Solved by a Dead Bird

The mystery of last week’s power outage at Los Angeles International Airport has been solved, city officials said Tuesday. And they have the body to prove it.

The Department of Water and Power has been struggling to pinpoint the source of the April 12 blackout, which caused dozens of flight delays. Engineers quickly produced a prime theory: A bird sitting on a power line touched an electricity pole, causing a short circuit. But the theory had a problem: No one could find the bird.

On Tuesday, DWP officials proudly announced that they had an electrocuted black crow in their possession, along with an admittedly strange tale of how they had cracked the case.

The agency also has a witness who it says backs up the story: The hotel worker saw the bird being electrocuted last week.

The body of the crow, she said, landed on the hood of a car in the back parking lot of the LAX Sheraton Hotel. She ran inside to alert co-workers, who delicately pulled the carcass off the hood and placed it on the pavement next to their outdoor break area. One worker even snapped a picture with his cellphone.

Kevin Thompson, an executive chef at the restaurant, said the sight of the bird disgusted him, so he picked it up with a plastic bag and threw it into a nearby dumpster.

“It was fried.... It looked pretty bad,” he said. “I didn’t want people having to smoke by a big dead bird.”

The power outage at 9:38 a.m. lasted for less than a second but caused equipment in the control tower to malfunction for several hours. DWP engineers said they had linked the short circuit to a power line on 98th Street and Vicksburg Avenue just outside the airport.

About the time hotel workers were dealing with the dead crow, DWP workers arrived at the power pole, but they saw no sign of a bird -- not even a stray feather. But they concluded a bird had probably been the cause because of tiny pitting marks on the power line.

The power line had 34.5 kilovolts coursing through its conductor -- enough to power about 12,000 residential homes. Engineers quietly doubted there had been any way a bird could disrupt the line and survive the shock.

“I’ve never seen a bird fly away from anything like that,” said electrical engineer Helyne Noyes. “I’ve seen some that are so fried they don’t have any feathers left. But alive -- never seen it.”

Pressure mounted over the next several days to find the cause of the power outage. So last Thursday, the DWP sent a crew out to the power pole, which is right behind the Sheraton.

Thompson, the hotel chef, happened to be outside and noticed workers clustered around the pole.

“I walked over and asked them if they were looking for a bird,” he said. “I told them, ‘We have it by the dumpster,’ and they just started cheering.”

So with Thompson watching, one worker climbed into the dumpster and waded through garbage. He emerged a few minutes later with the bird in his hand.

The suspect bird has been in DWP custody for several days, but top agency officials didn’t know that until a board meeting on Tuesday.

Although the circumstances of last week’s case were unusual, power officials said bird-related outages are quite common in the power industry. In the last three years, about 5% of all power outages were caused by animals, according to the DWP.

“You get a bird on one line pecking a bird on another, and that will cause an outage,” said Kent Noyes, the DWP engineering director and husband of Helyne Noyes.

“Other times, you get a bird with a big wingspan” that creates an electrical arc with the pole when it takes off.

The apparent solution to this whodunit met with some skepticism at the LAX control tower, where workers struggled to keep air traffic running in the hours after the outage.

“How can one little bird cause so many problems at the airport?” said Mike Foote, an air-traffic controller and representative for the controllers union. “It just doesn’t seem like it’s possible, does it?”