From ‘Black Start’ to Full Power : DWP: Energy control center battled crisis after crisis to restore electricity knocked out by the earthquake.

There is no street name on the two-lane road that winds up a rural hillside in the northeast San Fernando Valley. At the top is a tall, gray gate but no sign offering visitors a clue to the business that takes place beyond, in a windowless bunker.

Such secrecy has its wisdom: This is Los Angeles’ energy control center, the heart of the Department of Water and Power’s electrical network that brings power to 1.2 million customers. Protecting that lifeline from sabotage is essential.

But two months after the Northridge quake wrestled the city’s 5,000-megawatt power system to a sudden, cold halt, workers behind the tall gates offered a brief glance inside the secret compound to recount their fretful struggle to restore the juice in the morning hours of Jan. 17.

The most daunting challenge was reviving a system completely void of energy--what is known in the power business as a “black start.” For utility workers, it is the worst-case scenario, a challenge historically faced only by a small handful of cities nationwide.

“This was a catastrophe, a real catastrophe, a total catastrophe,” Dan Connolly, a senior power dispatcher, said as he sat behind his computer console overlooking the command center. “But that’s what we deal with here. This is what we do.”

In the hours and days following the quake, the otherwise restrained activities in the control center gained a new sense of urgency. Power dispatchers worked around the clock for several days, some sleeping on the floors in bathrooms and offices. Meals were brought in by supervisors. Workers ate at their desks and some only got up for bathroom breaks.

To restore power, workers relied on some imaginative engineering to circumvent rips in the power distribution web--lines downed and receiving stations damaged by the shaking. In one case, a crane was used as a stand-in for a downed transmission tower.

In the end, power to nearly all 1.2 million customers was restored within 24 hours, despite nearly $118 million in damage to the system.

“It was truly dramatic,” said Marcie Edwards, chief power dispatcher--the only woman in the nation charged with heading the electrical distribution system of a major utility.

Today, some of the 100 workers at the energy control center wear specially made T-shirts and hats that convey their pride in overcoming the crisis. The emblem on the shirts and hats depict a broken light bulb and the words “Black Start: Been there. Done that.”

About 80% of the city’s power comes from coal-fired plants in Arizona, Utah and Nevada and hydroelectric plants in the Pacific Northwest. The rest is generated at city-owned thermal and hydrogenerators throughout the Los Angeles Basin.

But the quake knocked out the gigantic network used to import power from plants outside the basin and triggered an automatic shut-off system that disconnected generators in the basin from the system to protect them from further damage. At 4:31 a.m., the city was completely in the dark.

For Edwards, the crisis was evident right from the start, when she called in from her home in Santa Clarita to the control center minutes after the quake hit.

“It’s gone. It’s all gone,” the senior power dispatcher on the graveyard shift told Edwards, then the line went silent.

Edwards comes from a long chain of electrical workers, dating back more than 100 years when her grandfather joined the city’s utility even before it was called the Department of Water and Power.

But none of her predecessors has ever had to deal with a black start.

“This was a career breaker, this black start,” Edwards said. “I could be back scrubbing floors.”

Connolly, who also heard the frantic message when he called the center, drove from his home in Valencia to Edwards’ home a few miles away. They both headed to the control center.

When they arrived at the entrance to the control center, they met up with a crew of firefighters who were trying to evacuate a top floor of the compound. The quake had tripped a fire extinguishing system, flooding the floor with halon gas, making it impossible to breathe.

Despite the chaos and the collapse of several major freeway routes following the quake, about 25 dispatchers and other workers had also reached the center by 5 a.m. and were already tackling the black start.

Some workers had even driven in on dirt roads, which follow high-power lines over the mountains.

Once at the compound, workers headed to the nerve center of the building: a huge circular room on the bottom floor that resembles a military command headquarters--its steel walls covered with diagrams of the entire citywide electric distribution system. Black lines represent 230,000-volt power lines, red lines represent 138,000-volt lines and blue lines represent 500,000 volts. Zig-zag lines depict circuit breakers. Boxes show locations of receiving stations and generators.

The dispatchers studied the diagram to devise a way to move power around the most heavily damaged sections of the system.

“There was a lot of brainstorming,” said Edwards as she paused in the middle of the command center, two months after the quake. “A lot of people were standing around different boards talking about ‘If we do this . . . No . . . If we close that circuit, then we can open this one . . . ‘ “

The trick to performing a black start is not regaining too much power too fast, Edwards said. They knew that an overload could bring the entire system crashing down, forcing dispatchers to start at ground zero. In 1977, New York was blacked out for 25 hours after a lightning strike, but, partly because of overloading, it took three days to completely mend the system.

The first step in restoring power was reconnecting Los Angeles to the Western Interconnection, the power grid that interconnects 68 utilities throughout the western United States.

In the first of many victories, dispatchers were able to get power from the outside network into the DWP’s oldest line, the 287,000-volt Victorville-Century line, which is located south of Los Angeles and farthest from the quake epicenter. They then channeled power to the Haynes thermal generator in Long Beach.

The luckiest residents were just beginning to assess quake damage when their lights came on again. The Haynes generator received power five minutes after the quake struck. Thirty-three minutes later, power had been restored to 80,000 customers in south Los Angeles.

From that small beginning, dispatchers and workers in the field began spreading the power from one generator to another through high-power lines, as if plugging together a long chain of extension cords around the city. They took circuitous routes from the south to the north, working around the most heavily damaged areas. By 8 p.m. that evening, portions of all four thermal generators in the city were on line.

An overwhelming problem was the transmission tower that carries power from the Castaic hydroelectric plant into the basin. It was thrown to the ground during the quake in the hills north of Placerita Canyon. DWP workers raised the lines off the ground with a crane and thus reconnected the city with the hydroelectric plant by the following afternoon.

“That stuff is unheard of,” Edwards said. “It’s immensely innovative.”

Back at the control center, while the team of dispatchers extended the power network around the city, a group of “power brokers” hovered nearby, negotiating over the phone the purchase of power from other utilities tied into the Western Interconnection. “That desk was a madhouse,” Edwards said.

Larry Kleven, a load dispatcher who lives in Northridge, the epicenter of the quake, said that despite the devastation to the system and workers’ fears about the safety of family and friends, there was never a sense of panic in the control center.

“The idea was to get it back,” he said. “That’s the job. Bit by bit. It’s what we are trained for.”

Weeks after the quake, news of the black start began to spread among utilities throughout the country by way of utility newsletters and magazines, turning the normally anonymous bunker workers into celebrities within their own field. Edwards said she and her co-workers have been inundated with requests from other cities to lecture about restoring utilities from a complete blackout.

“Not only was it the first time ever (for Los Angeles), but the best part is we did it so great,” Edwards said. “There was so much room for it to be a rough road.”