Transformer Blaze Leaves Downtown in the Dark

A greater-alarm fire at a city electrical station blacked out more than four square miles of downtown Los Angeles this morning, tying up traffic and leaving thousands of offices at a standstill in the city’s towering financial center, officials reported.

More than 37,000 electrical customers, including 30 of the city’s tallest office towers and largest industrial plants, were left without power after the unexplained fire erupted at 1:58 a.m. in a huge transformer owned by the Department of Water and Power. The blackout lasted more than eight hours until replacement equipment enabled power to be restored to all customers at 10:30 a.m., DWP spokesman Ed Freudenburg said.

The incident, coming less than a week after Thursday’s 6.1 earthquake, left thousands of besieged commuters struggling to get through darkened intersections and unable to work because of darkened offices and inoperable computers and elevators.

No major accidents or injuries were reported as officers directed traffic by hand through scores of intersections and many office employees simply stood and waited for electrical power to resume, police said.

Buildings hit by the outage included Crocker Center, Wells Fargo Bank and Security Pacific Bank, Freudenburg said. The area affected by the blackout was bounded by First Street on the north, the Santa Monica Freeway on the south, Central Avenue on the east and Hoover Street on the west, he said.

City Hall Unaffected

Los Angeles City Hall, just north of First Street, was not affected, but half of nearby Parker Center--headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department--was without power until about 10 a.m., police spokesman Bill Frio said.

The outage caused no problems for police trying to deal with the situation, Frio said.

“A lot of our outer rooms have windows,” he said. “As soon as the sun came up they had light coming in.”

DWP officials began working shortly after the fire was extinguished, shortly before dawn, to try to determine the cause of the blaze, Freudenburg said. So far, however, they have been unable to determine whether the fire was caused by an internal problem with the huge transformer or by external factors--such as last week’s earthquake or recent daytime temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.

“We’ve heard reports there was an explosion,” the spokesman said. “We can’t confirm that. An electrical arc (from a short) will make a loud sound like an explosion. That could have been the match that ignited the (fire).”

The receiving station, at 5th and Wall streets, is one of 22 in Los Angeles that receive power from sources throughout the Southwest and channel it to smaller distributing stations, from where it is sent to homes and businesses. The fire broke out in one of three 20-foot-high transformers that receive 230,000 volts of current and cut it down to 34,500 volts, Freudenburg said.

The fire was reported by Los Angeles police officers whose Central Division officers are across the street from the station. Officer Larry Seybert said, “It went off with one big boom. We all heard it in the station and ran outside and saw the flames leaping up across the street.”

Oil normally intended to cool the massive transformers helped to feed the blaze, according to Freudenburg. Such fires have occurred before but are rare and do not always lead to blackouts, he said.

Fire officials estimated damage to the station at $1.25 million.

Fifteen fire companies responded to the fire and took about 2 1/2 hours to extinguish it, fire officials said. Meanwhile, DWP workers were able to restore service to portions of the affected area by as early as dawn by drawing on the resources of other stations, Freudenburg said.

At 9 a.m., when many commuters were reaching work, about 26,000 of the 37,000 customers in the area were still without power, he said.