15 States Lose Electricity in Brief Outage

A brief but widespread power outage knocked out electricity through much of California and about 15 other Western states Tuesday, resulting in havoc on city streets where traffic lights went dead and causing a host of problems in office buildings where computers, fax machines, lights and air conditioning units shut down on a sweltering summer afternoon.

Power outages were reported in California, from San Diego to the Oregon border, and other states including Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Montana and Washington. In all, millions of customers were temporarily affected.

The outage began at about 1:25 p.m., when power transmission was interrupted on three major power lines that carry electricity from the Pacific Northwest to California.

The interruption occurred when circuit breakers tripped, shutting the lines down and interrupting the flow of 4,400 to 4,800 megawatts of power. (A megawatt is enough electricity to power 1,000 homes for a day).

That caused generators down the line, from California to other Western states, to overload, resulting in other automatic systems cutting power to customers all along the transmission system.

Cathy Sedlik, a spokeswoman for Southern California Edison Co., said the cause of the outage was not immediately determined, but that it is clear that the origination point was at a transmission grid at the California-Oregon border. The problem caused the “flow of electricity from the Pacific Northwest to stop” she said.

“It’s like one big pipeline of power,” Sedlik said. “It connects portions of the Western United States. When something goes wrong, a lot of areas are impacted.”

To restore the balance in the network, thousands of customers were automatically “shedded” from the system, said Marcie Edwards, a director for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

By late Tuesday afternoon, power was restored to virtually all of California.

“Generally, with a problem like this, power is restored rapidly,” said Edwards. “It’s not like a storm or an earthquake where the equipment is physically damaged.

“The average amount of time people in California lost power was about 10 minutes. The longest amount of time was not much more than 15 minutes,” Edwards said late Tuesday afternoon. “There might be not more than a few thousand people still without power in the state, but they’ll probably have it back by before too long.”

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power did not lose electricity Tuesday, but Southern California Edison Co. lost 500 megawatts, throwing more than 260,000 customers into the dark until 1:42 p.m. The customers were in Santa Monica, Culver City, Torrance, Redondo Beach and other South Bay cities.

In Pacific Gas & Electric’s service territory, which runs from Bakersfield to the Oregon border, half a million customers lost power when PG&E; lost 1,500 megawatts of electricity, said spokesman David Bicha in San Francisco.

Power was restored to 425,000 of those customers within an hour, and to the rest through the day.

While the power outage was brief, it created difficulties at a number of Southern California businesses. At Remi, an upscale restaurant on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, waiters frantically calculated customers’ checks by hand while the computers were down. And cooks working in the kitchen were nearly stifled by fumes from the food.

“The kitchen was almost paralyzed because the [ventilation] hoods didn’t work--it was almost unbearable to work in,” said Claudio Bonotto, a restaurant manager.

At the nearby Doubletree Guest Suites Hotel in Santa Monica, general manager Dennis Fitzpatrick was counting his blessings. At least the power outage occurred in the afternoon, he said, a time when there are few guests in the hotel.

“This was a stroll in the park compared to the [Northridge] earthquake,” Fitzpatrick said.

The hotel manager said he is actually growing accustomed to dealing with power outages. He estimates that the power goes out three or four times a year.

“This has happened before so we’ve learned how to live with it and not overreact,” said Fitzpatrick. “We just have to keep our guests informed, telling them that Edison is on top of the situation and the power will be back on as soon as possible.”

In northern and eastern San Diego County, 100,000 customers lost power for about 30 minutes. San Clemente was also among the areas affected.

Elsewhere in the west, the power outage created discomfort on a day of near-record temperatures, when power resources already were stretched. The mercury hit 102 Tuesday afternoon at the Salt Lake International Airport, breaking a record high for the date.

In northern Nevada, police in Reno and Sparks said so many traffic lights went out of service that they ran out of temporary stop signs. Casinos in Reno briefly lost power.

Time staff writers Jodi Wilgoren in Los Angeles and Lee Romney in Orange County contributed to this report. Correspondent Mary Moore also contributed.