Power Outage Hits Hospital, Offices; Downtown Dimmed

Thirteen large office buildings along Wilshire Boulevard and Good Samaritan Hospital were hit by an electrical outage at 8:54 p.m. Sunday, when a power surge struck through a 34,500-volt underground cable.

A Department of Water and Power spokesman said a large number of fire alarms were also set off in downtown, and lights were dimmed for a few minutes over much of the downtown area, including the Los Angeles Fire Department’s headquarters in City Hall South.

Good Samaritan authorities quickly switched onto auxiliary power facilities.

DWP workers were unable to say immediately what had caused the problem. They said it would take some time to check the cable. In the meantime, they visited each of the buildings to restore power manually after the surge.