Blackout Shows the Reach of Technology Into Daily Life

It used to be that restaurants didn’t have computers and the only way to get money out of the bank was to stand in line and wait for a teller--the human kind. Gas pumps weren’t connected to credit card networks. Emergency systems were run by people, not computers.

The “blackout of 1996” did more than demonstrate the nearly complete dependence of business and government on a host of seemingly infallible technological gadgets. It also provided dramatic proof of how unsettling it can be to go back to the old ways when those gadgets fail.

While most authorities and businesses claimed to have successfully pulled through the record blackout with well-honed contingency plans, when electronic push came to shove, the fragility of interlocking technology--ubiquitous in everything from cash registers to traffic signals--was exposed.

Consider the plight of workers at Giant Food in Morro Bay. When the power went out Saturday, people rushed to the store to stock up on candles, flashlights and food. There was just one problem: all of the items in the store had bar codes and the bar code scanner run on electricity.

A clerk, posted at the doorway of the darkened store, handed slips of pink paper and pens to customers and told them to jot down the prices of the items they wanted. The clerks could do the math. “Makes you think about when life was simpler,” one customer said.

Even more disturbing was the failure of more than one “crash-proof” system designed to provide public services. Officials--who have long proclaimed that everything from sewage treatment to emergency communication was protected by backup equipment and interlinking systems--spent much of Monday trying to assess what exactly went wrong.

Some saw in the blackout a warning sign that society must be better equipped to handle breakdowns in the intricate technology that has come to dominate daily life.

“Our society is evolving to a complex system of systems” said Bryan Gabbard, associate director of the science and technology division for Rand Corp., a Santa Monica-based think tank. “This interlinking controls the day-to-day activities of our work life. I don’t know what caused the power failure, but it had a massive impact because of this interlinking.”

Gremlins surfaced in unexpected places. Twelve Southern California hospitals shut down emergency services even though they had backup generators that were supposed to keep them running during any disaster.

There was a 30-minute interruption in communications at Los Angeles County’s emergency headquarters in Commerce; officials were unable to contact local hospitals or paramedics, despite supposedly crash-proof technology. Officials have been trying to get the bugs out of the system--which also failed during the Northridge quake--for years.

In a massive example of the dangers posed by interdependent systems, 6 million gallons of partly treated sewage was spewed from the city’s Hyperion sewage treatment plant into Santa Monica Bay, forcing closure of the beach until Monday.

“The idea of a total shutdown like this, which affected three counties, was something that was supposed to not happen,” said Chuck Ellis, a spokesman for the Department of Public Works.

Individual systems at Hyperion have backup power, Ellis said, but because many machines on the 144-acre plant are interconnected, the power outage had a domino effect.

“Think of the size of the equipment we’re talking about. We’re talking about pumps the size of your house,” Ellis said. “These are huge pieces of equipment. Even if they were only down 15 minutes, you don’t just turn a switch and turn them back on. You’ve got to bring them back on line slowly.”

Hyperion engineers met Monday to review the crisis.

“They’re debriefing everything. . . . They’re replaying it in their minds to see how they can do it better,” Ellis said. “We’ll also look at the redundancy [backup] question: Do we have enough? How much is enough? How prepared to we want to be, and how much are we prepared as a city to pay for the amount of preparedness we want?”

Perhaps most unsettling for the average person was the dawning notion that even mundane, seemingly technology-free aspects of life could be affected by lack of electricity. You couldn’t wash your hands in some places, for instance, because the faucets were hooked to electronic eyes.

And few expected that Los Angeles streets--which are, after all, just strips of asphalt-- could be thrown into chaos by a computer failure. But that’s exactly what happened when the power went off at the city’s traffic light synchronization center.

“As we have gone to computerizing everything in the city . . . we’ve greatly increased the efficiency of our operation,” said Tom Conner, assistant general manager of the city’s Department of Transportation.

Unfortunately, the devices that automatically switch off to protect the computers from power surges or brownouts had the unintended effect of making it difficult to turn the traffic lights back on when the power returned.

So on Monday, city workers were still resetting switches on some of the estimated 1,000 traffic lights that went dark Saturday.

At the height of the blackout, commuters endured the sort of gridlock the new system was supposed to prevent. Andre Moore, 22, spent four sweaty hours driving from Glendale to Santa Monica, much of it along Wilshire Boulevard and through 40 nonfunctioning traffic lights.

“Of course you get angry, but there’s nothing you can do,” he said, echoing the sentiments of thousands of Angelenos who found themselves unable to do things as routine as filling a prescription or buying gasoline.

At places where the blackout lasted longer, obsolete business practices were resurrected.

Thus, John Albertson of Soccer City in Long Beach found himself turning to simple arithmetic to calculate the sales taxes and discounts his register usually spits out with the punch of a key. He couldn’t let the occasion pass without imparting a back-to-basics lesson to the younger generation. “That’s why you go to school and take math,” he lectured a young customer.

Those with technology-dependent businesses were still assessing the impact of the power failure. By midafternoon Monday, Wells Fargo Bank, for one, had yet to reconnect 330 of the 2,100 ATM machines that went down statewide.

Of course, the seriousness of the outage depended a lot on your point of view. Thousands of the city’s immigrants--born and raised in developing countries where utilities are less than reliable--didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

“In places like El Salvador, a power outage is no big deal,” said Angela Sanbrano of the Central American Resource Center. “For example, every time there’s lightning or a big storm, you know the electricity is going to go out. You’re used to it.”

Darlene Isbell, the assistant director of the county’s office of emergency services, said the problems encountered by hospitals and the county’s emergency communications systems offer a special opportunity to add to their store of information on how to cope with disasters like major earthquakes.

“This allows us to isolate a problem, and ask what does a loss of power do to us. That’s something that is often hard to do when there is an earthquake and a number of systems, like water, power, staffing and structural problems happen all at once,” Isbell said.

Others, as well, saw in the blackout cause for optimism. Deprived of electricity for hours, freed of their computers and ATM cards, most people managed quite well.

“People were uncomfortable, people were inconvenienced, people were out of sorts, but people didn’t die,” said Clifford Stoll, author of “Silicon Snake Oil,” a critique of the computer industry. “There weren’t riots. Nor were there tears in the fabric of society. Quite the opposite.

“People are amazingly adaptable,” he added. “I think we are less dependent on electricity and technology than many people believe.”

Twentieth century frustration often gave way to that old time American trait, ingenuity:

At Topanga Canyon Chevron in Woodland Hills, customers desperate for gas simply left their cars at the pumps when the power died and the fuel stopped flowing.

“They’d throw us the keys and say, ‘When it comes back on, fill it up. Here’s my credit card. Here’s my phone number. Call me when it’s ready,’ ” said station manager Jay Graham.

His employees did just that.

Times staff writers Martha Groves, Douglas P. Shuit, Richard Simon, Eric Slater, Jodi Wilgoren and Nora Zamichow contributed to this story.