Power Outage Hits Chicago West Side for 2nd Weekend : Blackout: 25,000 homes and businesses are affected by a fire in a substation transformer. This time, no looting is reported.

Eight days after a massive power outage sent Bettye Gill and her husband cruising pitch black streets fearfully looking for their daughter, eight days after Andy Abdellaziz and his family lost most of the merchandise in their grocery store to thieves who struck under cover of darkness, eight days after Jeri Jackson spent a sleepless night at her liquor store to keep away roving bands of looters, the same impoverished area of Chicago was struck again Sunday.

“People were getting ready to go to church this morning when all of a sudden the lights went out,” said Newt Floyd as he sat on the porch of his bungalow Sunday afternoon listening to a transistor radio.

The lights and refrigerators and fans in 25,000 homes and businesses went out about 9 a.m. after an electrical fire damaged a transformer at a West Side Commonwealth Edison substation. Power was restored about 5 p.m. There were no reports of injuries, looting or other crime problems.

Frustration and anger were high in the area, which was just starting to recover from a massive blackout the previous weekend in which 40,000 customers lost power, many of them for several days. That outage was caused by a fire at a different substation. Damage from lost business, scattered looting and other problems associated with the first blackout, which hit at 10 p.m. Saturday, has been estimated as high as $10 million.

Reacting angrily to the second power failure, Mayor Richard M. Daley said Sunday that he would immediately appoint a task force to conduct safety inspections of every utility facility in the city.

Saying that he was “outraged” by the power failures, Daley called on the power company to compensate victims for their losses. “Commonwealth Edison owes them something for all they’ve been through,” he said at a City Hall press conference.

Daley said that free food would be dispersed at three locations on the West Side today. Additional police officers also were on duty in the area, and city workers were dispatched to put up stop signs at intersections where traffic lights no longer were working.

“The cost of the city’s response to these back-to-back emergencies will top $1 million,” he said. “But the cost is nothing compared to the loss and inconvenience to the citizens of Chicago.”

Commonwealth Edison officials said that workers heard a transformer “trip,” or shut off, because of a malfunction about 9 a.m., followed by an explosion. The cause of the accident is under investigation, and company spokesmen said that sabotage has not been ruled out.

“That was the first thing we wondered when we woke up--was it sabotage,” said Jackson, who kept her liquor store open Sunday, despite the lack of lights and air conditioning.

She said that her store had not been looted the previous weekend because she and family members kept watch there all night. “There were just people roaming the streets,” she said. “They passed by us and said: ‘We’re not going to bother you, so don’t worry about it.’ ”

It seemed to her, Jackson said, that looters were targeting Arab-owned businesses.

Two blocks away, at the small grocery store owned by the Abdellaziz family, the shelves were fully stocked Sunday, barely a week after looters tore a hole in the roof of the store and cleaned it out.

“When I came in about 12 o’clock (last Sunday), the lights were back on and everything was gone--everything,” said Abdellaziz, waving his hand at the shelves inside the darkened store. “We’re lucky this time.”

On this Sunday afternoon, a man at the store was struggling to close a metal grate that was stuck. And Abdellaziz and his brother accommodated a steady trickle of customers as they attempted to close the store for the second weekend in a row.

After the first blackout, headlines in one local newspaper declared the area in “crisis.” An angry Daley, reacting to criticism that he did not cut short a trip to immediately return to the city, chastised news reports for emphasizing looting and lawlessness and contended that everything had been under control. Political opponents took swipes at him because of his reaction to the emergency.

On Sunday, his response was different. He toured the damaged substation about noon, three hours after the explosion and fire. Later, at his press conference, he talked of the power company’s “moral obligation” to aid victims and said:

“I share the anger, frustration and disgust of all the people who are without power again today.”

In addition to Commonwealth Edison’s own investigation of the outages, the Illinois Commerce Commission is looking into the incidents.