High-Powered Job Has Some Dark Moments

Some call her “Low Flo,” and some call her “Power Flo,” but everyone just calls her “Florence” when the lights go out.

Flo Glazebrook’s official title seems longer than the power lines that snake every which way across the Western sky. She’s the engineering manager and designer of electrical distribution at Southern California Edison Co., which means she’s one of the most powerful people in the power business.

Simply put, Glazebrook knows more than you’ll ever know (or want to know, for that matter) about the elaborate chain of events that is set in motion each time you flip a switch.

Her job includes figuring out what went wrong when the power fails across Southern California.

“If the lights flicker, I probably react different than other people,” she says.

These days, Glazebrook spends time reacting to the continuing public outcry over events of Aug. 10, when 4 million people in nine Western states were plunged into dusky chaos, prompting widespread lack of confidence in the region’s power-delivery system.

Until the Great Blackout of ‘96, you probably didn’t know that your portion of Orange County’s power supply might be coming from Oregon, British Columbia or some other far-flung locale. You probably didn’t know that your reading lamp or chandelier drew power with blinding speed from generators half a continent away.

And you probably didn’t care. All you wanted to know the last time you called Glazebrook’s office was which bonehead kicked the plug out of the wall, and when some other bonehead was going to stick it back in.

“Electricity is considered a right,” Glazebrook says darkly, sitting before a hieroglyphic-like chart in a stuffy room at the Huntington Beach Generating Station, a key cog in the system she helped design, which now supplies 4.3 million customers.

“At one time, when we were electrifying America, it was very exciting. Before my time, in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, and even the early ‘50s, it was an extremely exciting time, and we were really welcomed,” she said.

Now people expect power, no questions asked. Interruptions unnerve them. More than any other consumer product, electricity has insinuated itself into America’s daily life, and those who supply it have become like baseball umpires: Invisible until they mess up.

Just a few generations have passed since a 32-year-old, tobacco-chewing whiz kid named Thomas Edison unveiled his carbon-filament lamp in Menlo Park, N.J. But Americans have quickly come to regard his lightbulb as their lifeblood.

And yet, there are few things about which people know less than those 120 volts coming out of the wall.

Many Southern California Edison customers, for instance, assume an alarm goes off somewhere when they lose power. Not so, says Glazebrook, shaking her head. “We rely on customer calls to tell us when there’s a problem on the system.”

Many customers assume that power runs to their houses only when they operate their lights. Not so, says Glazebrook, who explains that electric current is ever-present in your home, though that far-off generator does send power the moment you “turn on.”

If that sounds like a paradox, don’t feel dumb. Consumers have only recently begun grappling with concepts Glazebrook spent years studying in graduate school.

“I’d prefer it if I had a system that people wouldn’t have to think about,” Glazebrook says. “I’d love to do it so it’s transparent to them, just like the telephone. I mean, nobody understands how the telephone gets there.”

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How the electricity gets there is a long story. Usually, it starts with coal, oil or natural gas, which burns in a generating station like the one at Huntington Beach. The burning material produces steam, then pressurized gas that turns a turbine’s huge blades, then high-voltage electricity, a transformation that even Glazebrook regards with awe.

Essentially, the 50,000 square miles in Glazebrook’s distribution system (including all of Orange County, except Anaheim) proves what Zen masters have known for centuries: Everything is connected.

Through something called the Western Systems Coordinating Council, various utility concerns throughout the Western portion of North America give and share power in a never-ending flow.

“Flow” is a word you hear a lot around Flo Glazebrook.

Instead of a “grid,” that other word being bandied about in the news, picture a vaguely doughnut-shaped aura of flowing energy.

“Electricity is kind of a unique product in that you can’t store it,” she says. “So you have to provide it when people want it.”

But round-the-clock energy for everyone requires a delicately balanced system in which each action creates an instant reaction.

“When you turn on your light switch, it’s really impacting how that generator spins,” Glazebrook says. “It’s instantaneous. It demands a little more electricity from that generator.”

Even if you’re in Newport Beach, or Laguna Hills, the generator you impact could sit in Washington, or Utah, or Idaho, a concept few people can fathom. Perhaps it’s easier when you remember that power travels along those wires at 186,000 miles per second.

Think of power the way you think of water coming through your faucet, says Walt Pagel, production manager of the Huntington Beach station. Water is always there, under pressure, but it doesn’t gush out until you open your faucet.

Problems start when everyone opens their “faucet” at once, as happens during the height of air-conditioner season.

“Over the last week,” says Steven Conroy, a Southern California Edison spokesman, “we’ve been running on 18,000 megawatts of demand, which is very high.”

Megawatts are basic units of conversation with power company officials like Glazebrook, who sees the world in terms of voltage. Each megawatt equals 10,000 standard 100-watt light bulbs, or enough power to service 1,000 homes.

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Still, it wasn’t heavy demand that created the Aug. 10 blackout. That day, the culprit was a clumsy coupling of Oregon trees and power lines, followed by a domino effect along a network called the Pacific Intertie, which is basically an overgrown extension cord connecting consumers up and down the Western seaboard.

Such flukes are not uncommon in Glazebrook’s well-ordered, flow-charted life. On any given day, Mylar balloons from a children’s birthday party can drift into a power line, or palm fronds can ride the Santa Ana winds for miles before lodging in some innocent transformer, turning a quiet Westminster neighborhood into an island of darkness.

Under such circumstances, an expert’s job can be simply knowing how to do nothing.

“When the lights went out,” Glazebrook recalls with a guilty smile, “I was standing in a fabric store, and I thought, ‘Oops.’ ”

While others panicked, rushed home, or stockpiled candles, Glazebrook coolly sized up the situation.

“I thought, Hmm, it’s not a local problem. Probably a major problem. So I got on the phone and made a quick call and found out it was the Intertie. There was nothing I could do. So I went about my business.”

Of course, when she returned to work that Monday, there were hard questions to be answered, mostly from frustrated reporters and angry customers, all trying to understand her area of expertise.

And the thing is, she sympathizes.

“They shouldn’t have to worry about where electricity comes from,” she says. “They just want it to be there.”