Sylmar blaze pulls the plug on 115,000

More than 115,000 residences and businesses in widely scattered parts of Los Angeles lost power Saturday when the Sylmar fire damaged the main transmission network bringing electricity into the city, water and power officials said.

Entire neighborhoods were plunged into darkness for about half an hour Saturday morning, including parts of Mid-City, Crenshaw, Harbor Gateway and Sherman Oaks, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said. Traffic snarled on surface roads because signal lights were out of service.

Power was restored to all customers by 10:40 a.m. But DWP officials warned that more outages were possible as long at the fire continued to burn.

Additionally, they said the fire could present problems for the city’s water supply because ash was collecting in open reservoirs and slowing filtration.

“The situation remains alarming,” DWP chief executive David Nahai said by telephone from the Sylmar fire command post. “This is a very erratic and highly unpredictable fire.

“The winds have been gusting all night and all day with varying degrees of intensity, and the atmosphere at the command center is very tense.”

The lights flickered out about 10 a.m., the height of the breakfast rush at Jinky’s Cafe, a popular eatery on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks.

“Suddenly everything went dark,” said restaurant manager Joanna Borys, who had no choice but to send customers away hungry.

“We lost a lot of business,” she said. “This is one of our biggest days. People wait for the weekend to come out with their families. It was so sad to disappoint them.”

Los Angeles relies on power imported from Arizona, Utah and the Pacific Northwest to meet about two-thirds of its needs.

With fire racing along the Interstate 5 corridor north of Sylmar, DWP officials decided at 5 a.m. Saturday to take out of service the five high-voltage transmission lines running through the area, which carry most of the imported power into the city.

The step was taken to ensure the safety of firefighters working in the area, Nahai said.

Demand for power is low at that time of the morning, so the network’s secondary systems were sufficient to ensure there was no immediate interruption to electricity service, he said.

Three of the lines were brought back into service about 7 a.m. But two others remained offline after flames tore through the Sylmar switching station, Nahai said. When the intense heat and particles from the blaze caused a third line to fail at 10 a.m., he said, the network had to begin cutting power.

Engineers repaired the damaged line and restored service in less than an hour. But officials said it would take at least a week to complete repairs at the switching station.

The fire took out a control cable and cabinet, and also melted several hundred feet of cable, said Aram Benyamin, DWP’s head of power. Crews were ripping out the damaged cable and hoped to have a temporary hookup in place in 24 to 36 hours.

Until the fires are extinguished, DWP officials urge customers to limit their water and power usage.

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alexandra.zavis@latimes.com