Navy Denies Being Cause of Blackout : SDG&E; Seeks Reasons Behind Power Outage to See Who’ll Pay for Damages

Ranking U.S. Navy officials on Friday initiated an investigation to determine whether Navy aircraft conducting anti-radar exercises off the California coast inadvertently knocked out electrical service to 65,000 homes and businesses in San Diego County.

However, the Navy disputed assertions made by San Diego Gas & Electric Co. that the airborne exercise--which resulted in a 50-mile-wide cloud of nontoxic metal particles drifting over the San Diego area--was actually responsible for Thursday’s three-hour power failure.

“At the present time, there is just no evidence that what we were doing was related to the outage,” said Lt. Cmdr. Tom Jurkowsky, a spokesman for the Navy’s Pacific air forces based at Miramar Naval Air Station.

SDG&E; officials conceded that despite intensive searching, their workers had yet to find any of the tiny metal particles near the seven transmission lines and 24 distribution stations that short-circuited during Thursday’s episode.

“But we’re fairly certain that the Navy’s activities were involved,” said SDG&E; spokesman Maurice Luque. “If we can prove that this is what caused the problem, in order to protect our customers so that they won’t have to incur our repair costs, we will go after the Navy.”

The power failure caused traffic jams at many intersections when signal lights failed. The outage was blamed for at least one minor auto accident, it temporarily forced a San Diego television station off the air and it cut service to 100,000 cable television subscribers.

Radar service at Lindbergh Field also was temporarily disrupted during the incident, but no departing or arriving aircraft had to be diverted, Federal Aviation Administration officials said.

Navy spokesmen said that 31 of their airplanes on Thursday were flying 100 to 300 miles southwest of San Diego and were dropping “chaff,” hair-like slivers of a composite aluminum-fiberglass material resembling fine Christmas tree tinsel. Dispensed in bulk, the quarter-inch to three-inch slivers create a dense, cloud-like image on radar to baffle enemy efforts to detect “friendly” ships and aircraft.

Assigned to Miramar, the “electronic countermeasure” aircraft were participating in the second day of a quarterly exercise called “Hey Rube 85-2.” The six-day exercise is intended to train pilots to defend aircraft carrier battle groups, Jurkowsky said.

“This wasn’t the first time we’ve dropped chaff,” he noted. “We do it quite a bit. We did it the day before and had no problems.”

Navy officials declined to say whether their planes would continue to dispense the chaff in exercises this weekend.

Normally, after chaff is dispensed from a high-flying plane, it falls into the sea, Jurkowsky said. But on Wednesday, carried aloft by strong northeasterly winds that had not been forecast, “a couple thousand pounds” of the stuff drifted toward San Diego, he said.

Bob Vaughn, manager of the FAA’s Terminal Radar Control facility at Miramar Naval Air Station, which services Lindbergh Field, said he had been previously notified by the Navy that they would be conducting exercises off the coast. So when his air traffic controllers first spotted the chaff cloud 55 miles away--the maximum range of their radar scopes--they weren’t alarmed, he said.

That changed as the controllers watched the cloud spread over much of San Diego County.

“It was small at first, and it ended up covering maybe 50 miles around,” Vaughn said. “I was talking to the Navy this morning and they told me the winds just fooled them.”

As the rolling power outage struck, Vaughn’s radar screens were rendered inoperable for about three minutes. The system was quickly returned to service after FAA workers activated an emergency diesel generator.

However, even then, the radar screens were completely “whited out” with the harsh image of the chaff cloud, according to Jim Dea, facility manager of the FAA’s tower at Lindbergh Field. For approximately the next three hours, controllers had to depend on a secondary radar system to keep track of aircraft that were landing and taking off, he said.

“We really didn’t have any problems, though we did have to delay one departing flight for about two minutes until we could get things straightened out, but that was all,” he said.

Gary Stephany, chief of environmental health protection for San Diego County, said he was initially concerned that the chaff might be toxic.

“That was until we found out what it was,” Stephany said. “If it was what they said it was, we do not consider it a health problem. There apparently was no violation of any health law.”

SDG&E; spokesman Dave Smith said company officials at first were stumped by the loss of power.

“We were calling anyone and everyone we could think of, trying to figure out an answer, and somebody called the FAA,” Smith said. “They told us they had plotted this cloud coming in. We could almost superimpose our outages with where this thing drifted.”

Jim Holcombe, SDG&E;’s vice president for power supply, said a similar incident “years ago” disrupted electrical service in the Camp Pendleton-Oceanside area. But officials there as well as Navy spokesman said they could not recall such an incident.

An investigation will be directed by Rear Adm. Thomas Cassidy, commander of the Pacific Fighter Airborne Early Warning Wing, whose planes were involved in Thursday’s exercise.

Jurkowsky said he did not know how long the investigation would take.