The State - News from July 3, 1988

Lawrence Livermore Laboratory officials say they will not know until Tuesday or Wednesday when power is fully restored whether they lost any super computer data on nuclear weapons or magnetic fusion because of an explosion and fire. More than $250,000 damage forced closure of the secret government lab east of San Francisco on Thursday night. Hardest hit was the lab’s main electrical switching equipment. Fire also came within 100 yards of a building where plutonium is stored for use in nuclear experiments, but officials said safety systems would have prevented any explosions there. One of the lab’s emergency officers said crews would have to analyze damage and “how to patch around the damaged components, the burned out switches and the transformers” before the system could be turned on again to check for data loss.