Crews Struggle to Restore Power Lost in Winds

Power crews combed the east San Fernando Valley and northeastern parts of Los Angeles Sunday, retrieving downed lines and restoring service to thousands of customers who were left in the dark by the hurricane-force winds that pounded the area over the weekend.

Almost 9,000 homes and businesses, many of which lost power Saturday morning, remained without service into the early evening Sunday, said representatives of Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. But only a few hundred of them should still be without service by early this morning, they predicted.

The Santa Ana winds that caused the damage began to abate Sunday, although the National Weather Service predicted that northeast winds of 20 to 35 m.p.h. would continue through midweek in mountain and canyon areas, with some gusts reaching coastal sections below the canyons. Clear skies are expected today, with highs ranging from 67 to 75 degrees.

At the peak of the windstorm, more than 250,000 Southern California Edison Co. customers were without power in an area stretching southeast from Tujunga, through the San Gabriel Valley, and into parts of San Bernardino and Orange counties, said spokesman David Barron. Another 25,000 were in the dark in the Moorpark and Thousand Oaks area, he said.

“About 3,000 of the 4,000 we still have out are in La Crescenta and Monrovia,” Barron said Sunday afternoon. “We’ve brought in outside crews to help in those areas. I would say we have at least 50 crews working out there.”

Cause of Outages Most of the outages reported to Edison involved lines slapping against each other, he said, causing power losses that lasted only a few minutes. Either normal operation returned automatically or service could be reactivated by flipping a central circuit switch.

Other homes and businesses, however, remained without power throughout the day Sunday because of more severe problems. Several hundred La Crescenta customers lost service late Saturday morning when three poles toppled over, knocking out high voltage lines, Barron said. The area remained without power until Sunday afternoon.

About 5,000 of the 37,000 Department of Water and Power customers who lost service Saturday remained without power Sunday, said spokeswoman Elizabeth Wimmer. She said most of the damage was done in the eastern part of the city, including the Sunland-Tujunga area, Sylmar, Eagle Park, Mount Washington, East Los Angeles, El Sereno and Highland Park.

“These are all mostly small neighborhoods and individual service areas that are down,” she said. “It is very time-consuming work for the crews because we have to go up and put up hundreds of these wires, all in different locations. It’s not like going in and hitting one circuit to get hundreds of people back on line at once.”

Problems With Telephones Telephone crews also worked to restore service to customers Sunday, although General Telephone lines weathered the storm far better than Pacific Bell lines did.

“Amazingly, we have no major outages and only a very few individual problems, probably fewer than 100,” said General Telephone spokesman Larry Cox. He said most of the downed lines were in the Tujunga and San Bernardino areas.

Pacific Bell received 474 trouble reports between the start of the storm Saturday and 8 a.m. Sunday. Spokesman Larry Mobbs said most of them were in the Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena areas.

“The bulk of it seems to be that branches, trees, or wind have pulled down or broken the drop wires that run from the utility poles to the houses,” Mobbs said. Although more than 60 repair people were in the area to get the wires back up again, he said, a few of the customers may not have phone service back until early this morning.