Power Failure Hits Westside, Closes UCLA

A huge part of the western Los Angeles Basin was plunged into darkness from mid-afternoon until 9 p.m. Tuesday by a major power failure that cut off supplies to 105,000 residential and commercial consumers and shut down most of UCLA.

No major life-threatening problems resulted, but streets and buildings in nine communities from Bel-Air in the north to Venice in the south were completely blacked out, traffic piled up in chaos as evening rush hour commuters tried to negotiate miles of city streets with no traffic signals working and dozens of people, stuck in stalled elevators, had to be freed by Los Angeles firefighters.

The power outage also cut short the workday for thousands of people employed in the affected areas and jammed telephone lines to police and other authorities. Traffic-jammed streets slowed down ambulance services.

Equipment Malfunction

A major equipment malfunction at a receiving station at 1840 Centinela Ave. in West Los Angeles resulted in the loss of power to Department of Water and Power customers in West Los Angeles, Westwood, Mar Vista, Pacific Palisades, Century City, Bel-Air, Brentwood, Marina del Rey and parts of Venice at 3:30 p.m., DWP spokeswoman Dorothy Jensen said. The problem involved a failure in the equipment controlling the circuit breakers, she said.

The station was still able to receive current, but could not pass it on to customers, she said. The failure of the Centinela Avenue location, in turn knocked out power generated from 18 smaller stations, another DWP spokeswoman, Treva Miller, said.

DWP crews worked furiously to repair the damage, but it was nearly four hours before service was resumed to the first 5,000 customers in Beverly Glen and Mar Vista. Some businesses in high-rise areas of Century City and Westwood had electricity restored early in the evening by switching to alternate power sources.

Classes Canceled

The whole UCLA campus was blacked out and all night courses planned for Tuesday were canceled.

“We had some people caught in elevators, but there were no real problems,” UCLA security officer Debby Williams said.

Even the UCLA Medical Center was briefly without electricity until emergency generators switched on, but patient care was not interrupted, a hospital spokesman said. Auxiliary generators were plugged into the main corridors, but battery-operated lamps were used in waiting rooms.

Emergency medical technician Brian Roney, 25, said no blackout-related victims had been brought into the hospital, and everything had gone smoothly. But on the waiting room wall, the electric clock was frozen at 3:3O p.m.

Traffic congestion resulting from the blackout was so bad that the Police Department declared a Sigalert in the area bordered by Mulholland Drive, Beverly Glen Boulevard, Jefferson Boulevard, and Pacific Coast Highway. Dozens of extra patrol and motorcycle officers were sent from other areas of the city to help restore order.

General Telephone Co.--which services most of the region involved in the outage--had to switch to emergency generators to keep services running. But equipment was so overburdened with callers trying to find out what was going on, the lines became jammed. To ease demand, police appealed to the public to use telephones only for emergencies until after power was restored. Those making emergency calls were told to dial 911, instead of directly to local police stations.

Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Larry Ford said about a dozen elevators stalled in the middle of their runs when the power went out, but fire crews quickly responded and freed more than two dozen people who were trapped. No injuries were reported.

Two workers were trapped on an electrically operated hoist while cleaning windows on the outside of the sixth floor of a building at 4818 S. Lincoln Blvd., in Marina del Rey, but the men were rescued, Ford said.

On Grammy Awards night, Group W Cable television, which services thousands of homes in the blackout area, also was a victim of the power failure. Switchboards at the company were jammed with calls, but nothing could be done for customers until the power was restored.

Wilshire Boulevard, normally a blaze of lights from glaring street lamps and the windows of towering luxury apartment houses and office buildings, took on the eerie aspect of a ghost city with only the headlights of crawling cars illuminating the high-rises against the black sky.

South of Wilshire, there were no lights as far as the eye could see.

At the Churchill, an 11-story condominium in the 10000 block of Wilshire Boulevard, three members of the building staff had parked their cars in front of the building with their headlights on to illuminate the massive entrance lobby.

The doorman, Aaron DeCorvi, in his green livery, and other members of the building staff helped residents, many of them elderly, up the dark stairwells to their homes, handing out flashlights and candles as they left them.

“It’s amazing how people are pitching in,” he said. “Even people who have the reputation of being reclusive are coming out of their shells and mingling.”

Some of the worst traffic tie-ups were in Westwood. UCLA security officers, wearing orange luminous vests, turned out to help Los Angeles police officers control matters.

Crowds fumbled their way around the streets of the UCLA campus-oriented community, but many of the shops and restaurants normally open for busy evening traffic were closed.

At the Pizzaria Santo Pietro, in the 1000 block of Gayley Avenue, owner George Santo Pietro supervised his staff as, by candlelight, they cooked pizzas in the gas -fired ovens.

“Everything’s fine,” he said. “If you want to make a disaster out of it (the power cut) you can close your doors and go home. We decided to light candles and have some romance. The only thing that’s missing for us is our normal tape music.”

Finding the way around Westwood was difficult. And it could be dangerous, especially crossing the streets.

Anne Berenstein and her three children, Jason, 8; Jarret, 5, and Lauren, 4, found a solution. They crossed holding hands, with mother lighting up the family with a flashlight so cars could see them.

“It’s the only way we can cross the streets,” she said. “Everyone has been real nice to us.”

The DWP said power was fully restored at 9 p.m. Engineers for the untility launched an investigation to determine what caused the equipment failure.