A CITY IN CRISIS : DWP Crews Try to Right the Power : Watts: After days without electricity, residents of the Nickerson Gardens neighborhood welcome repair workers. ‘They’re angels,’ a church caretaker says.

Electrician Allan Strafford does not see much adulation in his daily work. The Department of Water & Power supervisor has been called names, ignored or, at best, rewarded with a smile or a pleasant hello.

But Saturday, Strafford and his DWP work crew stepped into the limelight as they rolled into the gritty Nickerson Gardens housing project to the cheers and applause of Watts residents who had been deprived of power since hours after the Los Angeles riots began.

Strafford’s team was one of 60 DWP units that fanned out to strife-torn areas of Los Angeles to bring light back to about half of the 29,000 customers who have done without since Wednesday or Thursday.

The orange-uniformed workers, accompanied by some 300 heavily armed county marshals and California Highway Patrol officers, restrung downed wire, replaced toppled telephone poles and repaired fire-scarred circuit boxes. Due to the volume and nature of the work, DWP officials said, about 12,000 to 15,000 customers will continue without power until at least today.

Though highly familiar with high-tension wires, DWP mechanics are not as used to the degree of tension they found on the streets Saturday. Their day was charged by a steady refrain of sirens, gunfire and crackling police radio chatter replete with rumors of gang members cruising South Los Angeles with semiautomatic weapons.

Regardless, Strafford’s crew remained unruffled. “To me, it’s just work,” shrugged electrical mechanic Rick Lympany, 30.

However, outside the Tabernacle of Faith Baptist Church at Central Avenue and 114th Street, caretaker Lloyd Owens, 74, thought otherwise. He likened the DWP workers’ service to a religious experience.

“To me, they’re angels,” Owens said. “I didn’t have lights for three days.”

The convoy assigned to the Nickerson Gardens neighborhood began its 12-hour day at 6 a.m. at a DWP plant just west of downtown Los Angeles, where seven service trucks hooked up with four police cars carrying rifle-toting county marshals.

Because law enforcement resources were stretched too thin to provide armed escorts Friday, electrical crews were unable to reach violence-prone residential neighborhoods such as Nickerson Gardens until Saturday, according to DWP officials.

Early in the day, these missionaries of light faced a particularly chilling moment, when LAPD officers stationed outside the Watts housing project ordered them to remain outside the grounds because of the sound of gunfire in the area.

Nearly half an hour later, they finally received the go-ahead to enter and were greeted with cheers as they caravaned down 114th Street.

“It’s been worst at night,” noted resident Brenda Watson, 37. “We’ve been in complete darkness and chaos. No TV news and radio. And I had a few things in the icebox, but they’re spoiling.”

Watson and other residents said that the lack of power had served to increase nighttime tensions in the housing project. Some families had been able to purchase candles in one of the few remaining markets open in the vicinity, Watson said, but the price had been jacked up to $1 per candle.

The DWP convoy soon moved on to a block of private homes on 110th Street, just north of Nickerson Gardens. There, they restrung several wires that had been singed by an arson fire that gutted the Central Avenue headquarters of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, an anti-poverty organization that has provided jobs and social services to Watts residents since the 1965 riots.

When electricity was restored, 110th Street residents who had been looking on from their front stoops let out a round of applause.

“With kids,” emphasized Latonya King, a 22-year-old mother of two, “you can’t do anything in the dark.”

By 1 p.m., Strafford’s crew was ready to replace a wooden electric pole, holding up a 34,500-volt line that had buckled when a Central Avenue mini-market burst into flames Wednesday night.

There, church caretaker Owens looked on as his wingless angels--hovering 45 feet over the ground in buckets hoisted by cranes--went to work.

“It’s kind of cool” to be called an angel, Strafford, 38, later reflected. “But you know, what can you do? You’ve got to get the wires back up.

“And,” he pragmatically added, “it’s better to do it with an armed escort.”