People Grow Chilly on Coliseum Repairs : Football: Cold USC-Notre Dame crowd finds that refurbishments after earthquake leave a flawed facility.

Last Saturday night’s USC-Notre Dame football game, which drew 90,217 fans to the Coliseum, exposed some serious shortcomings in the storied old stadium, only recently repaired after January’s earthquake at a cost of $72 million.

Not only did the power fail for as long as 45 minutes in parts of the Coliseum at the end of the first half, and water pressure drop sharply in many restrooms and concessions stands, but on perhaps the coldest game night in the facility’s history, there were few hot drinks, and in some concession booths, no hot dogs.

All of this has prompted a letter of complaint from USC, warning Coliseum officials that they must take steps to rectify matters before the school’s next high-attendance game, against UCLA, next Nov. 18.

Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Coliseum Commission president, said Thursday, “Any time you have major construction, you’re going to have to have some things done later.

“Apparently, the plumbing pressure is fine for 70,000 people, but when you get up to 90,000 it’s a problem. My understanding is, everything will be corrected and can be corrected.”

At one point Thursday, Mac Freeman, new marketing director for Spectacor, the Coliseum’s manager, said the water pressure problem had resulted from an earthquake repair that reduced the size of the water main supplying the Coliseum.

“So when the building is up to an 85,000, 90,000 crowd, it has a problem handling that kind of capacity,” Freeman said. “It was never a totally dead flow, but the pressure dropped significantly. . . . It is being looked into, because obviously the UCLA game next year is looking at the same size crowd.”

Freeman’s remarks disturbed Don C. Webb, the director of the repair project.

“I don’t know who Mac Freeman is or what his qualifications are,” he said. “The water main to the facility was never changed. It was never replaced, because it was never damaged.”

Webb said the problem was that when all the restrooms were operating at once with a capacity crowd, “it drew sand and debris, grit is the word, out from within the city’s water mains and caused several of the shut-off valves, which control the toilets, to stick in the open position. So, there was a constant demand for water, which lowered the overall pressure.”

Later, Freeman’s boss, Coliseum manager Pat Lynch, calling from Florida, where he was attending a meeting, said, “We are still looking into exactly what the cause was. We’re not 100% sure.”

There is no smaller main, he said. But the separate urinals installed during the repair use more water than the troughs that formerly were in the men’s rooms.

“This is the first time we’ve had a full house,” Lynch remarked. “The next day, when the Raiders drew 58,000, we had no problems.”

For Raider games, tarps cover portions of the Coliseum, limiting capacity to 68,000. For USC’s big games, the tarps are taken off and the stadium has a capacity of 94,000.

ABC network and Coliseum officials contradicted each other on the cause of the power outage, which briefly interrupted ABC’s coverage of the game and forced the network to borrow a feed for a time from Prime Ticket, which had its own generators.

During the Coliseum repair, electrical subcontractor Mike Guinn said Thursday, roughly $1.5 million was spent installing three new power stations at the Coliseum. At the time, it was said this would sharply increase the power supply to the facility.

Guinn said it was not the power stations that went wrong, or any outside power supply, but rather that ABC was to blame.

“Their cables and breakers were laying on the ground. It sprinkled or rained Friday night, and hours later, during the game, that moisture got in one of their breaker boxes and it caused it to go out or trip,” Guinn said. This affected some other parts of the Coliseum, he added.

Jonathan Leess, ABC’s vice president for production planning, disagreed.

“I think somebody is looking for an excuse,” he said.

“It had to start with the Coliseum, not with us. Anybody who knows anything about power knows we could not have caused a problem beyond our TV trucks. . . . We have TV trucks all around the world. It’s very, very rare we’d have a short-out on equipment.”

Leess said ABC has always had problems at the Coliseum because of inadequate power.

“If any of our cables caused any sort of short, our breakers would have blown,” he said. “They didn’t.”

The Coliseum had some of its traditional problems with the huge crowd, such as a shortage of parking on the grounds. The stadium has 6,000-7,000 spaces and could use up to 30,000.

But once parked and inside, at prices ranging up to $90 for a motor home, chagrined spectators Saturday night found it hard to get a cup of coffee or even a hot dog, as the wind chill dropped below freezing.

“It was a memorable night,” said Ron Price, general manager of Volume Services, the Coliseum concessionaire. “The power outage was part of our problem.

“Normally our coffee sales are less than a tenth of 1% of our total. We lost a kitchen due to the earthquake, so we had no facility for making coffee, large scale. . . . People were looking for the hot things. We had anticipated additional coffee sales, but it was a pretty overwhelming situation because it was such severe weather, especially the wind.”

As for the hot dogs, “the timing of the power outage was very bad,” he said. “Normally, hot dogs would have been cooked.”

USC’s sports information director, Tim Tessalone, said that in fairness to Coliseum officials it was much colder than anticipated.

Still, he said, “We are writing a letter to express our concerns. They’ve always responded well to us in the past. . . . Next year’s UCLA game, those situations better not happen.”