Day 1 of Rationing Leaves DWP Inundated : Water: A flood of calls sinks phone system. They deal not with drought but with power outages caused during rainstorm.

On Friday, the first day of water rationing in Los Angeles, unhappy customers flooded the city’s Department of Water and Power with complaints.

Not about the drought. About the rainstorm.

Department workers who had been braced for calls from customers worried about the mandatory 10% cut in water usage instead found themselves dealing with customers experiencing a 100% cut in electricity usage.

The department was inundated with inquiries from many of the 35,000 customers whose power was disrupted by Friday’s storm. Officials blamed the scattered outages on lightning strikes, short circuits and fallen trees.

Later, in another ironic twist to the city’s first day of water rationing, nearly half a million gallons of fresh water were lost when a DWP water main burst under a busy Sherman Oaks street Friday afternoon.

Water gushing from a broken 60-inch-wide pipe under Ventura Boulevard blasted a 20-foot-wide hole in the pavement and sent three feet of rushing water into shops along a fashionable stretch of the boulevard known as “the Melrose of the Valley.”

There were no injuries and most of the damage appeared to be limited to buckled pavement, Los Angeles Fire Department officials said. The cause of the break had not been determined.

At DWP headquarters, the department’s phone system and its 170 operators were already overwhelmed with calls by midmorning. City officials took the unusual step of broadcasting an appeal for customers to refrain from calling unless they were reporting such things as downed poles and wires.

Across town, at a garment district warehouse converted into the department’s drought headquarters, operators running a special water rationing hot line also fielded power-outage calls.

The hot line’s first call of the day was from a homeowner without electricity who was unable to get through on regular DWP lines, said Thomas A. Jamentz, the department’s manager of water conservation.

Because of the rain--and the please-don’t-call-unless-it’s-an-emergency request--calls about water rationing were unexpectedly light, the office’s 19 operators discovered.

Some of those who dialed the toll-free line (800-439-7728) live outside Los Angeles and are not affected by the city’s water rationing order.

“You’ll have to speak to your water company about your amount of usage,” hot line worker Audrey Grant told a caller from Diamond Bar. “We’re only asking people in the city of L.A. to cut back 10%. But we all do need to conserve.”

Ann Howard answered a call from a Riverside County man who asked if Los Angeles could send him conservation information he could not find in his community.

“Most people really do want to help,” Howard said afterward. “Some water companies haven’t done anything yet. I live in San Gabriel and my company has not said a thing to us about conservation. I think it’s terrible. The drought is affecting all of us.”

Times staff writer Philipp Gollner contributed to this story.