EARTHQUAKE / THE LONG ROAD BACK : Power Web Frayed : System Is So Interconnected, Quake Knocked Out Electricity in Idaho and Canada

When the earth shook Monday morning, massive damage to vital power facilities in the northwest San Fernando Valley cut electricity from one end of Los Angeles to the other, the first time in history the whole city was blacked out.

But that was not all.

Customers in Alberta, Canada, lost their power too. In fact, as frantic Los Angeles Department of Water and Power officials were launching their battle with the city’s worst power disaster, neighborhoods were flickering out from Nevada to Wyoming.

Outside of Los Angeles, the most disruptive effects of the Northridge earthquake were in rural Idaho, where 150,000 customers lost power for three hours.

Southern California’s earthquake thus offered a dramatic illustration of how intimately the entire western states are interconnected in a gigantic and immensely complicated system that shuttles energy back and forth to protect the sockeye salmon of the Columbia River and help reduce smog in Los Angeles.

Because of the region’s key role in the interdependence of the power system throughout the West, the quake could have triggered outages in much of western America.

But despite the massive inconvenience experienced by Los Angeles residents as harried workers struggled through the day and night to reconnect the city, the big energy highways righted themselves almost without human intervention.

“We never want this kind of test, but we had an awesome test,” said Dulcy Mahar, spokeswoman for the Bonneville Power Administration, the agency that wholesales federal hydroelectric power from the Columbia River basin. “The system worked.”

Of 1.3 million DWP customers blacked out immediately after the quake, all but 60,000 in two pockets of the San Fernando Valley had service restored by Tuesday night, said Eldon Cotton, assistant general manager for power. Although the system will soon be fully running, the repair and replacement of damaged equipment will go on for more than a year and cost $200 million, he added.

In addition to the entire city of Los Angeles, 600,000 customers of Southern California Edison from Montebello to Santa Barbara lost power, said Steve Conroy, communications director for the power systems division of SCE. Power had been restored to all but 150,000 by dusk and 1,500 by Tuesday morning, Conroy said.

Emergency crews were hoping only to rig up temporary connections to bypass a still-undetermined clutter of damaged equipment.

“We’ve got to tie things together that aren’t normally tied together,” said Charles P. Serazio, who worked to come up with solutions. He is superintendent of the Rinaldi receiving station in Mission Hills, the largest of seven stations that distribute the city’s power. “It’s a lot of creative problem solving.”

Monday morning, Serazio looked up disconsolately at long aluminum bars called buses that resemble railroad tracks suspended 40 feet in the air. They were twisted and bent toward the earth.

He said the damage had punched a hole in an electrical beltway that circles Los Angeles, mixing power from dozens of sources and moving it in all directions.

His immediate goal was limited: to energize a small part of the station to deliver power to the DWP’s nearby water pumping station to help restore potable water to the city. Only then could he begin to think of getting power back to people’s homes.

By midafternoon, Serazio’s workers had strung a thick red cable along the ground to bypass damaged equipment. Then he waited for a switch operator at another station to energize the line.

By Tuesday morning, while large portions of the San Fernando Valley had yet to get electricity, a haggard-looking Serazio was still at it. He smiled wanly as a psssst sound rose from a bank of transformers where workers were busy connecting live wires.

“That’s a comforting sound,” Serazio said.

The most devastating blow to the system occurred only a few miles to the north at a cinder-block building and caged yard of transformers called the Sylmar Converter, the southern terminus of an 846-mile, million-volt transmission line between the Southland and Pacific Northwest.

The control building of the Sylmar Converter, demolished in the 1971 Sylmar earthquake and rebuilt to tougher seismic standards, was once again badly damaged. Floors tilted, file cabinets tumbled across offices and complex electronic switching banks broke open, disgorging their circuitry.

By midday Monday, the building still did not have power, and work was going on inside under the glare of a generator-fed floodlight.

Supt. Brent Hollingworth said he thought it would be possible to get part of the plant running by the end of the day by connecting it to the city’s coal-burning power plants in Utah, Nevada and Arizona.

The first hurdle, though, would be to get power into the building to run the controls. That power had to come from the Rinaldi receiving station, which had no power for its own controls. Until Rinaldi got its first line connected at 2 p.m. there was nothing Hollingworth’s crew could do.

That was only a sample of the interrelatedness that spread the effects of the Los Angeles earthquake across the Pacific Northwest.

Southern California was exporting power at the moment the lights went out. Through the night, when demand is low in the south, power moves north along the direct-current highway and three smaller alternating-current lines, to the colder areas where demand peaks at night, Mahar said.

A similar cycle occurs annually, as Southern California turns off its air conditioners and northern residents turn on electric heaters.

When the complex connections were severed in Los Angeles, the result was observed by sensors along the system as a loss of frequency.

“If your frequency doesn’t match the equipment, you can blow out transformers,” Mahar said.

“We had 750 megawatts moving northward on the line,” Mahar said. “When the quake hit, it couldn’t move. It tried to reroute itself through the east.”

That caused frequency changes in Arizona and Utah.

“A power island formed,” Mahar said. “This island took itself off the inter-tie as a protection. It was like tripping a giant circuit breaker to protect our equipment.”

Almost immediately, as load was shed from the system, generation was increased by building the flow of water through hydroelectric plants in the Columbia basin, Comish said.

In all, about 13 utility companies lost some service to hundreds of thousands of customers, said Bill Comish, director of dispatcher training for the Western Systems Coordinating Council, a Salt Lake City-based cooperative of 63 utilities that exchange power across the west.

The blackouts, dispersed in pockets from Nevada through Alberta, Canada, ranged from 8,300 customers in Spokane blacked out for 20 minutes to the 110,000 in Seattle for 30 minutes, Mahar said.

The worst blackouts hit southeastern Idaho near Treasureton, Comish said, because that is the location of a sophisticated protective program installed to disconnect the system in just such an emergency.

The interdependence of the western power grid pays dividends to both north and south.

“The net benefit of all this interconnectedness is cheaper power,” Mahar said. “Because we can swap power during peak times, we don’t have to build idle power plants.”

A protracted drought that has been depleted reservoirs since 1987 has aggravated the north’s power needs.

The subsidiary benefits can be subtle.

“It helps us with our fish problem,” Mahar said.

To protect the endangered sockeye salmon, the Bonneville Power Administration is required to guarantee specific levels of water flow during the spring breeding season. Power from Southern California allows the agency to save water behind its dams for the spring.

“It’s helped Southern California shut down fossil fuel generation,” Mahar said.

Once, Los Angeles generated 80% of its own power at four natural gas burning plants. As regional air pollution standards have tightened, the DWP has replaced those generators with coal-burning plants in Arizona and Nevada.

On Tuesday, one of those old plants, in Sunland, was running again. It had been fired up to get the city through its crisis.

Restoring Vital Elements

Monday’s quake left more than 1.3 million power users in the Los Angeles region without service. The priorities followed by the Department of Water and Power when restoring major outages:

1. Critical need: Service to customers serving a critical public need, such as hospitals, police and fire stations and airports.

2. Number affected: Service is restored to the greatest number of people. For example, a damaged circuit serving 800 users is assigned a higher repair priority than one bringing power to 10 users. Areas with large businesses have higher priority than those that are primarily residential.

3. Individual needs: Problems affecting individual homes and businesses.

UTILITY PROBLEMS

* Without power: 95,000 users were without power as of late Tuesday afternoon. Areas still affected included Northridge, Tarzana, Encino and Sylmar and the Palms, Fairfax and Koreatown sections of Los Angeles.

* Preventing trouble: Those still without power are asked to switch off all nonessential electrical appliances to ensure that when service is restored, the sudden power draw does not overload circuits.

* Without water: 50,000 users remained without water as of late Tuesday afternoon, primarily near the Northridge epicenter.

* Purifying tap water: The earthquake knocked out all DWP water purification systems and shook loose sediment from pipes. It is safe to bathe and wash clothes in tap water, but do not drink it without boiling or treating it with chlorine bleach. The remaining sediment poses little harm, and can be strained out before drinking. Boil water vigorously for at least 10 minutes to kill biological contaminants. If you are without power and unable to boil water, add two to four drops of chlorine bleach per quart of tap water.

* Areas affected: Authorities broadened the areas in which residents should boil or bleach water before drinking it. The regions now include all of the San Fernando Valley, all of Los Angeles west of Fairfax Avenue, and neighborhoods north of Sunset Boulevard between Fairfax and Western avenues.

Source: Los Angeles Department of Water and Power

Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times