Damage Control : Utilities: The DWP reverses its much-criticized denial of claims involving a transformer fire.
As bad luck goes, it was very bad, but that part Mary Kapich could handle. The unfairness, though, was almost more than she could bear.
Her 1986 Buick, parked on Canby Avenue in Reseda, was reduced to a charred husk on Feb. 3 when an overhead bank of electrical transformers suddenly erupted in fire, showering the ground with flaming oil and debris.
“It looked like . . . an A-bomb had dropped on it,” Kapich said. “I mean, it melted everything right down to the wires in the seats.”
Worse, in Kapich’s eyes, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, owner of the three transformers, refused to reimburse her and at least seven others who suffered property loss, contending that it was not legally responsible.
Kapich, a 67-year-old diabetic who lives in Chatsworth on $1,000 a month in pension and Social Security payments, had relied on the car as her sole means of transportation. Certain that she would be reimbursed, Kapich said she spent her last $1,600 to rent a Nissan Altima for 10 weeks--only to learn that her claim had been denied.
“I’m usually the calmest person around, but . . . I got hysterical,” Kapich said last week, her voice choking with anguish. “I can’t believe that the Department of Water and Power in a city like Los Angeles is so irresponsible as to not take responsibility for something like this.”
*
But things are looking up for Kapich and the other claimants. After maintaining as recently as last week that it had no legal basis for paying damages, the DWP reversed itself after inquiries from The Times.
On Monday, Harvey H. Lutske, the utility’s chief claims agent, said he plans to contact Kapich and the others to inform them that their claims, totaling less than $15,000, will be paid. (Kapich is seeking about $6,500 to cover the car and her rental expenses.)
“These are not clear, black-and-white issues,” Lutske said Monday. “One thing we always try to keep in mind is we do want to work with our customers.”
Councilman Joel Wachs, who in the past has accused the DWP of “grossly excessive” spending on travel and staff meals, said this was the wrong place to economize when told about the case.
“DWP has spent so much money unnecessarily and wasted so much, that when a little old lady parks innocently and without knowledge under a DWP property and their property causes her damage . . . they should pay her. . . . Her whole ability to function is dependent on this,” Wachs said.
“This is where a department that has often been thought of as very cold and uncaring should do something that indicates it’s more customer-friendly.”
DWP officials said they had based their denial on provisions of state law that set a higher liability standard for public agencies than for private individuals or businesses. Under California law, they said, the utility and similar public bodies must be negligent to be held legally responsible for property damage.
According to officials, the transformer fires could not have been foreseen or avoided by preventive measures--and therefore the department was not negligent.
“The policy is that we pay claims that we’re legally obligated to pay, and if under the law we’re not legally obligated to pay . . . we don’t pay,” Philip Shiner, an assistant city attorney in the DWP’s legal division, said last week.
“If we didn’t have a standard by which to decide whether to pay a claim or not . . . it would be left up to every individual in the department,” Shiner said.
But after inquiries about the case, the DWP late last week asked its engineers to review the cause of the blaze. This time, they concluded that negligence may indeed have been a factor.
*
Within the DWP grid are about 140,000 transformers--large, drum-shaped devices suspended on power poles and platforms that convert electricity from high voltage to the lower voltages used by homes and businesses.
David L. Reed, staff engineer with the DWP’s power distribution division, said transformer fires are exceedingly rare. And in a career spanning more than 30 years, Reed said, he has never heard of three transformers catching fire simultaneously as occurred on Feb. 3.
Reed said this suggests the chance of a construction error when DWP crews installed the platform and transformers in 1992. “It is very hard to try and piece that together, because the fire pretty much left us with very little by way of physical evidence,” Reed said.
“But we believe that the strongest indicator that we have that this was generated by the construction . . . is that all three transformers underwent this failure.
“We don’t like to think that our crews make mistakes like this, but they’re human and we know that they do, and we can’t eliminate the possibility.”
To Kapich, the department is splitting hairs. “I’m not saying they were negligent,” she said. “I’m saying their property destroyed my property. . . . An hour earlier, I would have been killed in that car.”
