Metallic Balloons : Inflated Fad Often Has a Fearful Jolt

The 60th anniversary bash CBS threw itself last spring in West Hollywood had all the trappings of a power party, right down to the shiny metallic balloons. But when the balloons floated away the next day, the fun fizzled out.

The highly conductive balloons became entangled in Southern California Edison Co. power lines, the utility says. With a flash and a bang, the 4,000-volt Cynthia line serving 930 customers in Beverly Hills melted and fell onto the La Peer circuit. This 16,000-volt line, which serves 1,015 customers, in turn shorted out with a brighter burst of light and a louder thunderclap.

The blackout, lasting more than 12 hours, cost the utility $12,438 and injured one of its employees. Now, in what is apparently the first case in California against people who cause an outage through the release of metallic balloons, the power company is suing Chasen’s restaurant, which catered the party; Regal Rents Inc., which provided the tent, and the as-yet-unknown manufacturer of the balloon, among others.

Menace on the Move

The CBS party blackout is just one more example of the increasing menace of metallic balloons.

Balloon-caused outages in the last year have affected more than 350,000 customers, fried the innards of hundreds of microwave ovens and VCRs, crashed computers, cut off traffic signals during rush hour, shut down a newspaper on deadline, hit a college on registrat1768910368defense contract work. They cost California utilities more than $600,000 last year and their customers millions.

“It is skyrocketing,” said Ted Porter, Southern California Edison’s South Bay area manager.

Power failures caused by balloons, while a tiny fraction of all outages, are the fastest growing cause of blackouts for San Diego Gas & Electric Co., the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Southern California Edison--doubling over the last two years.

Space Age Invention

The story of the balloons, improbably, touches on the U.S. space program, the late avant-garde artist Andy Warhol and the 1984 Olympics. The phenomenon links household appliances, Valentine’s Day and the eternal vagaries of the wind.

A debate pits the politically potent utilities, who argue that safety is the issue, against the upstart balloon industry, which contends that the real question is “the smile of a child.”

Balloon blackouts hit hardest at Southern California Edison, which serves 3.5 million customers. They rose from 106 in 1986 to 229 in 1987. In the first part of 1987, they even outpaced the car-hits-pole type of outage.

In a nub, this is the problem: the same metallic gleam that sells so many balloons provides an excellent conductor of electricity. When a balloon comes into contact with two lines, or joins a line to a ground, an immense surge of power can flow along lines not built544501536transformers, melt high-tension lines and overload home circuits.

Utility officials know of nobody who has been seriously injured or killed by balloon-caused power trouble. But they say it is just a matter of time before someone is.

A spokeswoman for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which had 140 balloon-caused outages last year, said downed wires caused by metallic balloons started several fires in the East Bay area.

“My big fear is that someone will get killed,” said Jim Cassie, manager of state governmental affairs for San Diego Gas & Electric.

A close call took place on the beach in Torrance two summers ago, Porter says. After a cluster of balloons got stuck against a strand of a 16,000-volt line, a youth “went home (and) got the aluminum pool pole to get them off. He was wearing tennis shoes and on dry sand. All he got was a good shock,” Porter said.

“Ultimately, someone is going to get hurt.”

In a sort of truce, the utilities now are working with the manufacturers, urging stores to sell only balloons attached to weights.

But some simply say: Ban the balloon.

“The only thing I can see is to eliminate the metallic balloon,” said Grant Hanson, superintendent of electric trouble for the Los Angeles DWP.

The now familiar metallic balloon is created in a process that deposits a thousandth-of-an-inch-thick film of vaporized aluminum on Mylar fabric.

Launched Into Orbit

In 1960, a metallic balloon 100 feet in diameter was placed in circular orbit 1,000 miles high. The balloon offered a light-weight platform that reflected radio beams and served as a low-tech prototype of the modern communications satellite.

“After NASA,” said Jeff Raimundo, a spokesman in Sacramento for the Silver Balloon Assn., “Andy Warhol came along and designed metallized balloons as art objects in the 1960s.”

Early efforts by the Lionel Corp. to market the balloons were not successful and by the early 1970s, they had practically vanished.

In 1978, the four companies that now account for more than 80% of the market--M&D; Balloons Inc., of Brisbane, Calif.; Anagram International Inc. of Minneapolis; Container Technologies Inc. of Barrington, Ill., and Pioneer Balloon Co. of Wichita, Kan.--began producing the balloons as carnival novelty items.

With their attractive gleam and greater longevity, these balloons began to supplant latex despite being several times more expensive. Today, the balloons are a marketing success story. Annual sales approach 100 million balloons for a gross of $300 million.

The potential for wreaking havoc with utility lines went largely unnoticed until the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics when thousands of the balloons were released at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

Drifting to the earth half an hour later near the Los Angeles River, the balloons shorted out two 230,000-volt lines serving 200,000 customers including, momentarily, the Coliseum itself.

Even then, nothing much was thought about metallic balloons for several years. In 1986, utility officials began to realize they had a problem.

In San Francisco, 20,000 customers were cut off on Valentine’s Day.

On Feb. 3, a balloon settled into 16,000-volt wires just behind the Torrance offices of the Daily Breeze at 12:15 p.m., right on deadline. The blackout knocked out the newspaper for 37 minutes and also hit the Little Company of Mary Hospital, which had backup power, and the Torrance Courthouse, which did not. A judge was stuck in an elevator.

Three days later, a damaged conductor finally failed and the newspaper lost power again. A year later, the Breeze was hit a third time, again losing power on deadline.

Record for Failures

On New Year’s Day, 1987, the Southern California Edison Co. set a record for outages caused by metallic balloons, recording 26 power failures.

“In Santa Monica, we had a whole cluster of these balloons settle into a substation there at 10:28 a.m.,” said utility official John Cawdrey. “That one got about 9,000 customers. We’re talking about downtown Beverly Hills, the hotels, the shops.” Most customers were affected for about two minutes, but some did not get power restored for 46 minutes.

Southern California Edison officials were shaken. “We just realized we were really having a problem with this thing,” Cawdrey said.

On Valentine’s Day last year, metallic balloons caused an outage in Santa Monica and three in Compton. The CBS anniversary party outage came on May 19.

While that one may become one of the best known short circuits, another one, on Aug. 3, did more damage.

Balloons shut down the entire El Segundo substation at 8:55 a.m., blanking out miles of traffic lights on the Pacific Coast Highway during rush hour, shutting off the large aerospace facilities of Hughes Aircraft, Northrop Corp., Douglas, Computer Sciences and 11,900 other customers.

At Hughes, the loss of power set off alarms.

“We had to evacuate about 1,000 people for about 40 minutes,” said spokesman Ray Silvius. “We had one of our vice presidents . . . stuck for 30 minutes” in an elevator. “We lost air conditioning. . . . Our main computer center was down for two hours.”

At the Northrop facility in Hawthorne, where the F-18 Hornet is assembled, officials estimated that the outage cost Northrop $200,000.

In mid-August, Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa lost power during student registration.

On Aug. 30, at 2 a.m., Bob Broyles of Redondo Beach was sitting in bed, reading a magazine. A few blocks away, Lorraine Nelson lay asleep in her apartment.

Suddenly, said Broyles, “the room lit up very brightly and the lights went out.” The lights then brightened, died for a few minutes and then came on for good.

While he settled down, Nelson could not sleep.

“I woke up because I smelled this acrid smell. The smell was in the microwave,” she said. It didn’t work anymore. The wire coil in a dimmer light switch had fused, leaving the light stuck in the “on” position. Her VCR did not work. The building elevator was out.

When he awoke in the morning, Broyles made similar discoveries. His brand-new microwave oven did not work. Neither did his color TV.

But if a metallic balloon that had landed at a nearby substation was bad news for Broyles and Nelson and almost 3,500 other customers, it was good news for the crew at nearby Microwave Oven Medic.

“We were hustling microwaves, that’s for sure. I fixed about 40 to 50,” said shop technician Sherman Winner.

As balloon after balloon descended on electrical equipment throughout California, the power industry and balloon manufacturers and retailers last year engaged each other like a pair of jet fighters in a dog fight.

The first move came in March when Assemblyman Steve Peace (D-Chula Vista), at the urging of utilities, introduced a bill directing the Public Utilities Commission to study the problem and report back to lawmakers. In an accompanying statement, the Pacific Coast Electrical Assn. said the problem was so bad that the balloons should be banned nationwide.

The balloon people got the word out and letters began pouring in. Henry Unger, West Coast representative for Pioneer Balloon, wrote that the Legislature should protect the balloons as a domestic industry.

“The harm that could come to American metallic balloon manufacturers could be catastrophic if the efforts of a few zealots who have their own private objectives are allowed to prevail,” he said.

Sparkle in the Eye

From Pineville, N.C., Gary W. Page, president of Floating Flowers, a division of God’s Little Gift Inc., wrote: “The true value of our industry, however, cannot be measured in dollars and cents, but in the smile of a child, the sparkle in the eye of a terminally ill patient. . . . “

“What next?” sputtered John L. Wagerer, president of J&D; Wagerer Inc. of North Miami, Fla. “No bubble gum due to clogged sewer drains?”

In Torrance, the ordinance controlling temporary signs was amended to ban metallic balloons in May, 1986. The intent was to eliminate balloons from outdoor sales promotions. No one has been charged with violating the measure.

The most Draconian of the measures was proposed this fall in Redondo Beach, where the city attorney drafted ordinances that would make the sale or possession of metallic balloons illegal.

“I envisioned children’s birthday parties getting busted and I don’t think that is the intent--lining up 5-year-olds against the wall and frisking them for balloons,” said City Atty. Gordon Phillips.

Meantime, a cessation of hostilities was called in Sacramento.

“The opposition we ran up against tells you there is a lot of money in the balloon industry,” said Cassie, chief lobbyist for San Diego Gas & Electric. And, he conceded, the letter barrage was hitting the target: “Who wants to tell a little kid they can’t have a balloon?”

In a pilot program, balloon manufacturers agreed to provide little cardboard weights that could be tied to the strings of the balloons to prevent them from floating away.

Stores in Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach got the weights in early January. The cardboard rectangles carry printed inscriptions that warn of the dangers of releasing balloons.

Matter for the Lawyers

Watching this latest development, somewhat impatiently, is Leonard Sisk, associate general counsel and manager of claims for Southern California Edison.

“We are working with the manufacturers,” he said. “But it is going to have to produce some fruit pretty soon or we will have to go in another direction.”

Sisk is the leader of the second prong of the power industry’s attack on the balloon problem. In September his office filed the suit in the case of the CBS anniversary party blackout. No rulings have been issued in the case.

The suit also strikes at the manufacturers, alleging that the balloons are inherently unsafe and that customers have not been warned of the dangers.

George Kieffer, who represents two balloon manufacturers, said they “believe that the balloons are not unsafe but like anything they can be used in an unsafe way.”

This New Year’s Day, Southern California Edison reported 11 blackouts affecting 13,700 customers in Santa Monica, the South Bay and Orange County. Now, utilities are bracing for Valentine’s Day, the largest day each year for balloon sales.

Bob Krauch, spokesman for Southern California Edison, said he is aware that romance typically soars during blackouts, balloon induced or otherwise.

“There are switches for that, legitimate Underwriters-Laboratory approved light switches to properly control atmosphere,” he said with mock sternness. “Edison is not the Cupid here.”