For Bar, Outage Meant Strike 3

It was 1-1 at the bottom of the seventh inning and the VIP Room, a no-frills neighborhood bar on Beach Boulevard in Westminster, was packed with tense Dodgers fans.

Carolyn Getz, night bartender and die-hard Dodgers fan, was mixing a drink when, suddenly, the whole room blacked out.

“It was terrible!” Getz said the next morning. “I lost all my customers.”

In all, about 500 Westminster customers in the Civic Center area lost power at 8:24 p.m. Tuesday, according to a spokesman for Southern California Edison Co., who attributed the outage to a failed underground cable.

Within the next hour, the company received more than 100 calls.

Most customers had their power restored within 20 minutes--in time to see the ninth-inning homer by the Oakland Athletics’ Mark McGwire that would break Dodger fans’ hearts.

But 125 of them, including Getz, her customers and three Dodgers fans at Ken Crane’s, a software store in the 14200 block of Beach Boulevard, had no power until 10:30 p.m.

When the power went out, the three in the software store said they locked the door and ran across the street to a delicatessen, where the power was still on.

“It was unfortunate timing,” the store’s owner, Ken Crane Jr., said the next day with sarcastic understatement. “They could have waited until after the World Series.”

Getz said most of her customers reluctantly left for other bars when they saw that the east side of Beach Boulevard had gone dark.

“They wanted to see the game, and I don’t blame them,” she said. “But they all came back when the lights went on. I got good customers.”