4 Workers Hurt in Electrical Blast

An explosion in an underground transformer vault blasted a 30-foot fireball through a manhole at a Costa Mesa intersection Thursday and hurled four workers through the air.

Three of the injured men were hospitalized with burns.

“It was like a bomb when I was in Korea,” said Larry Crutcher, a salesman at a nearby auto dealership. “ . . . Big, black smoke and then a big ball of flame. They were standing there and it blew two of them like 20 feet. One guy was just screaming.”

The 8:30 a.m. blast at Harbor Boulevard and Fair Drive occurred as three Southern California Edison Co. workers and a city Transportation Department employee were working on a 12,000-volt transformer that had been knocked out of service by a construction accident less than an hour earlier.

As the others watched, Edison foreman Gary Owsley probed the electrical vault beneath the sidewalk with a fiberglass pole, said Jim. E. Kennedy, an Edison area manager.

The explosion tossed the men across a dirt lot and displaced the 1,000-pound concrete vault cover, said Charlie Clarke, a city construction inspector.

Owsley, 36, suffered third-degree burns on his hands. Lou Gonzales, 42, suffered second-degree flash burns on 6% of his body. Both were in the UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange, where Owsley was reported in stable condition and Gonzales in good condition.

Ray Navia, 39, the third Edison employee, was reported in stable condition at Costa Mesa Medical Center with first- and second-degree burns. Chris Dahl, 29, of Costa Mesa, the Transportation Department worker, suffered minor burns and was treated at the hospital and released, a nurse said.