Couple Smolders at Power Play by DWP

Marc and Cindy Jacoby were sitting in their Northridge home minding their own business one night last December when their electrical appliances suddenly started acting like something out of the movie “Poltergeist.”

The lights became intensely bright, the refrigerator motor began racing, and the transformers in the air conditioner melted.

The culprit turned out to be a surge of electricity, not spirits. But the Jacobys say they are spooked nevertheless by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s refusal to pay the $269 in appliance repair bills that resulted from the freak power surge.

What really has the Jacobys fuming is that the DWP has spent several times that sum--thousands of dollars, the Jacobys contend--to avoid paying the $269. Cindy Jacoby had taken the dispute to Small Claims Court and won. But the DWP appealed the case to Superior Court, where the earlier decision was overturned.

Not the Only Ones

DWP officials said they do not know how much the department spent to win the case. They said the Jacobys were not the only ones trying to obtain damages from the city.

“It just seems that it’s a waste of money going to court and spending so much money so that they don’t have to pay me when it was their fault,” Cindy Jacoby, 28, said in an interview.

It’s not that the Jacobys desperately need the money, Cindy Jacoby said. Marc Jacoby is a credit auditor, and his wife does free-lance public relations work at home while caring for their 1-year-old daughter, Danielle.

“But it’s the principle of the matter,” Cindy Jacoby said. “They were at fault. Their equipment caused the damages. I mean, I certainly didn’t cause the voltage surge.”

But DWP officials insist that they were not at fault and say their refusal to pay is also a matter of principle--and precedent.

The mysterious Dec. 11 power surge, which struck 18 homes in the Jacobys’ neighborhood, was an unpreventable, “one-in-10-million” freak occurrence, said Deputy City Atty. Herbert Zinman, who represented the DWP in its Superior Court appeal.

The incident was caused when two pieces of unrelated electrical equipment on two power poles in Northridge failed. This created an electrical interaction that lasted less than a second, but caused an excess of electricity to flow through power lines in a block-long section of Northridge, Zinman said.

“We didn’t do anything wrong to cause her appliances to go out,” Zinman said. “Nothing the Department of Water and Power did was negligent.” He attributed the power surge to “a quirk of the nature of electrons.”

“Once in a while, something weird happens, and I guess that’s just the nature of molecules,” Zinman said. “No amount of testing, maintenance or inspection would have prevented the incident. Even if the department had been up there five minutes before this happened with infrared sensing equipment, there’s still no way this could be predicted or prevented.”

The Jacobys took the DWP to Small Claims Court last summer and won, but the DWP appealed the verdict, hiring an expert witness to testify in court.

With admitted reluctance, Van Nuys Superior Court Judge S. S. Schwartz last week ruled in favor of the DWP, saying the law clearly required such a verdict because the city was not negligent. Because the case originated in Small Claims Court, Jacoby has no further legal avenue of appeal, officials said.

Jacoby represented herself at the appeal in Van Nuys Superior Court Oct. 28. She had a court case, provided by a friend with access to a computer legal data base, that she hoped would prove her point.

Three witnesses testified for the DWP, including Dr. T. C. Cheng, chairman of the USC electrical engineering department, who served as a consultant for the DWP. Jacoby claims Cheng told her his fee was $2,000 an hour.

Cheng refused to discuss the case or his fee with a reporter. Zinman said that Cheng’s fee was minimal.

Schwartz said he ruled in the DWP’s favor because there was no evidence of negligence by the DWP.

To recover damages, Jacoby would have had to prove that the incident was reasonably foreseeable and the city could have prevented the damage, the judge said. “If there’s any way I could have ruled in her favor, I would have ruled in her favor,” Schwartz said. “The law was against her.”

But Schwartz said he still tried to convince the DWP to pay Jacoby, although the DWP had no legal obligation to do so.

Schwartz said he told the DWP lawyer, “My goodness, you’ve got all these engineers, these expert witnesses here. Why don’t you just take care of this lady? It’s only a couple hundred dollars.”

Zinman said most of the money spent by the DWP was for investigation that would have been necessary regardless of whether the DWP fought the cases in court.

The amount spent to fight the case is irrelevant because the city was not found at fault, he said.

‘Open the Floodgates’

“If we pay her, what’s the precedent for everybody else in this situation?” Zinman said. “If every time a person filed a claim with the city, the city paid whether they had to or not, what do you think would happen? You would open the floodgates.”

Schwartz, however, said the DWP would not be setting a legal precedent by paying Jacoby.

But Zinman said the case could have bearing on other cases brought against DWP for the same power surge.

Fourteen other Northridge homeowners have brought claims against the city, Zinman said, but only three--including the Jacobys--filed lawsuits in Small Claims Court.

In one of the cases, a Small Claims Court judge ruled in favor of the city. Two others, including the Jacobys’, were decided by court commissioners in favor of the residents, Zinman said. The city appealed both of those decisions.

The other case is scheduled for trial on Tuesday in Van Nuys Superior Court.

But Jacoby, for one, is disconsolate about the outcome of her own attempt to fight the system.

“The system failed me,” she said. “It just isn’t fair.”