45-Minute Blackout Hits 232,000 Customers in Valley

A 45-minute electrical failure struck the San Fernando Valley on Friday evening, causing a blackout for 232,000 customers in an area from Burbank to Tarzana, briefly snarling traffic, troubling airport traffic control and stranding high-rise office workers in stalled elevators.

Lights flickered and computers shut down momentarily in downtown Los Angeles and West Los Angeles areas in a spillover effect from the sudden loss of power in the Valley, the Department of Water and Power said.

The outage, which began about 5 p.m., was caused by an undetermined equipment failure that prompted an automatic protective shutdown of power at DWP stations in North Hollywood and Van Nuys, according to DWP representatives.

Left without service were 142,800 customers in Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks and Encino, they said. Meanwhile, 90,000 customers in neighboring Burbank lost power in a domino effect from the North Hollywood problem, according to Dennis Moran, power production superintendent for the Burbank Department of Water and Power, which is linked to the DWP grid.

Power was restored by 5:43 p.m. to all but 5,000 customers, and all power was back on by 7 p.m., DWP spokeswoman Debra Sass said.

“It was a widespread outage and there were a lot of customers affected,” Sass said. “But luckily it didn’t last for too long.”

DWP officials said they believed the initial problem was in a circuit breaker or high-voltage underground transmission cable, but were still investigating. If the automatic shutdown had not occurred, “people would have been in the dark a heck of a lot longer,” said Dave Mahoney, DWP’s assistant manager of power operations.

The outage forced the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport to temporarily rely on emergency generators, a spokesman said. But no flight delays were reported.

Traffic officers were dispatched to about 50 intersections, mostly in Sunland, Van Nuys and North Hollywood, to relieve congestion, the city Bureau of Enforcement and Intersection Control said.

Times staff writers Bettina Boxall and Stephanie Stassel contributed to this story.