Electricity Back On in South L.A. for 80% of Those Who Lost Power

Electricity was restored Sunday to more than 80% of South Los Angeles residents who had lost power, but 5,000 remained in the dark, keeping their food cold with dry ice and lighting rooms with candles and kerosene lamps.

Department of Water and Power crews have restored power to 25,000 of the 30,000 customers left without service in the wake of last week’s riots.

Most of the customers without electricity are in the south-central and southwest sections of the city, including a mile-square area near the southern end of the devastated Vermont Avenue business strip. Many residents there are elderly people who live alone or in homes for the aged.

Some, including the bedridden and the wheelchair bound, have been without gas or electricity for four days.

The fear and uncertainty that followed Wednesday night’s fires drove some older people who had been living independently to the safety of group facilities.

At the Vermont Knoll Retirement Center, most of the 120 residents have been sleeping in the lobby or a first-floor community room so they could be easily evacuated.

Others, however, refused to leave their apartments.

An 85-year-old woman who would not be moved was slightly injured after she fell while trying to maneuver through her darkened apartment Thursday night, but no major crisis occurred, said the retirement facility’s manager, Jewell Anderson.

“They were intimidated, they were scared, but they withstood,” she said of the home’s residents, who range in age from the 60s to 107.

About 75% of the residents in the surrounding area are also elderly, Anderson said. Some had lived in the area for decades and managed to hold onto their homes or had moved to apartment buildings reserved for senior citizens.

Thea Uota, a spokeswoman for the Department of Water and Power, said Sunday that workers were aware that Vermont Knoll and nearby customers were without power and considered them a priority.

“They have been trying to repair the circuits for the last two days because they have extensive damage,” she said. “The whole distribution system was destroyed and it is going to take a while.”

At the retirement home Sunday afternoon, residents with walkers and canes filled the couches in the lobby. Food had been delivered to the facility by the Santa Clarita Senior Citizens Center in Newhall, and Anderson said she was making arrangements for some excess to be distributed to the hungry in surrounding areas.

Medicine, particularly insulin for diabetics, was being kept cold with donated dry ice.

Mary Ethel Ramsey, a fragile 84-year-old who gets around with a cane, was at the facility Sunday even though she moved out last month.

She had called Anderson on Friday, panicked because she had not seen the woman who drops in to care for her since Wednesday. Her lights had gone out then, as well, and she said she was living on cereal and milk.

“I was just scared and lonely,” said the former seamstress, who came to Los Angeles in 1969 from Milwaukee.

Another resident, Mary Woods, 85, had twisted her wrist in a fall in the dark three days earlier, but was bustling about her three-room, second-floor apartment, which she had not left since Wednesday.

Asked if she had become alarmed when she saw news reports of the rioting before the power went off, she brushed away the question.

“No, honey, baby,” she said, laughing, “I prayed to God and slept in my bed.”