An Unexpected Gloom at City, County Offices

A power outage in downtown San Diego on Monday snarled traffic and disrupted business at several major downtown buildings--including City Hall, the County Administration Center, the U.S. Courthouse and the U.S. Naval Supply Depot. Electricity was restored to most of the area by early afternoon and no serious accidents or injuries were reported.

Among the governmental departments affected by the power failure were the San Diego police and fire departments and the Metropolitan Correctional Center--a jail that houses defendants in federal trials. However, auxiliary generators enabled essential operations at the three buildings to continue unimpaired, spokesmen said.

“In effect, it just slows everything down,” said Lt. Frank Moe of MCC. “We were down to one elevator and we had to key a lot of doors that are usually operated electronically. . . . Basically, it just makes the staff walk a lot of steps.”

Workers at City Hall were not as fortunate. About 700 had to be evacuated from the building and one secretary sustained minor injuries when she fell in a darkened stairwell, said George Story, director of the city’s Citizens Assistance and Information Department.

“It was pitch black. Fortunately, we had flashlights,” said Marla Brubaker, manager of the public information office on the 13th floor. “Everyone was very calm and orderly, though.”

A meeting of the City Council’s Transportation and Land Use Committee was canceled because of the outage. The City Council was not disrupted because its regular meeting was scheduled for Monday night in Southeast San Diego.

The outage began at 7:55 a.m. when a line carrying power from a generating station to the substation at Broadway and Kettner Boulevard short-circuited. That in turn overloaded a circuit breaker, which then caught fire and burned insulation on the fifth floor of the substation, said Alan Stewart of San Diego Gas & Electric Co.

San Diego firefighters contained the fire shortly after 10 a.m., said Larry Cook, a Fire Department spokesman.

While the fire was controlled relatively quickly, the task of restoring power to downtown was more time-consuming, as SDG&E; workers had to turn switches in numerous underground switching stations to redirect energy from other substations into downtown, Stewart said. As a result, more than 1,700 SDG&E; customers remained without power until early afternoon.

“The reason this thing was so big is because we hit all the wrong customers--the Navy, the county administration building, the prison,” Stewart said.

Shortly after the outage occurred, Mayor Maureen O’Connor, Chief of Police Bill Kolender and City Manager John Lockwood met in the city’s Emergency Operations Center, in the basement of the City Operations Building at 1222 1st Ave. After conferring, they decided to give affected city employees “an extended lunch break” until 1 p.m., Story said.

When power was restored about 12:10 p.m., City Hall offices reopened, but elevators did not begin operating until late afternoon. Employees in offices on the top four floors of the 13-story building were told they did not have to return to work if they did not feel they were physically capable of climbing the steps, Story said.

As power was restored, officials shut down the Emergency Operations Center, which had last been activated during the Normal Heights fire of July, 1985.

No estimates were available Monday on the cost of the damage to the Kettner Boulevard substation, Duncan said.

San Diego County’s last major power outage occurred in January, 1985, when thousands of bits of metallic “chaff,” dropped by the Navy as part of an experiment in radar jamming, landed on power lines, causing a series of short circuits that knocked out power for 58,000 customers, SDG&E; spokeswoman Karen Duncan said.

Although Monday’s outage affected only a fraction of the company’s customers, it was of comparable importance because of the number of public buildings involved.