So Far, More Angst Than Grief in O.C. Blackouts

By SCOTT MARTELLE and MAI TRAN

March 21, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

How do you plan for the unplannable?

If you’re the manager of the high-end Stuart Moore jewelry shop in Newport Beach’s tony Fashion Island, you print up little paper signs to tape to the door in case the power dies and you have to lock the customers out and the gems in.

Then you wait.

“It’s been in the corner of my mind this morning,” Lee Duren, the store director, said Tuesday, adding that a Wolfgang Puck restaurant a couple hundred feet away was darkened for nearly an hour the day before. “It’s really interesting to see how electrical lines can be drawn.”

For all our reliance on electricity to power our daily lives, the disruptions Monday and Tuesday haven’t been that disruptive, primarily because they have been short. An hour here, an hour there. Kitchens close and cash registers won’t open, but in the end, it all amounts to a long coffee break and a few lost sales.

It does, however, make for some anxiety.

Police departments in several cities scrambled Tuesday to direct traffic at darkened intersections. In Huntington Beach and Buena Park, plainclothes detectives were back in uniform for the day after those cities were warned of imminent outages.

But the lights stayed on in Buena Park, where nine detectives, five motorcycle officers and 20 police volunteers had hit the streets.

“It was all for nothing, but it was a good drill,” Buena Park Police Lt. Ken Coovert said.

Power did go out earlier near South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, contributing to a collision about 10:45 a.m. Police said a car driven by a motorist identified as Jane Clark struck another car driven by Christopher Cruz as Cruz was exiting the San Diego Freeway at South Coast Drive, where the signal lights were out.

“She didn’t realize the lights were blacked out,” Costa Mesa Police Officer Chris Bates said. Both drivers were treated for hand and wrist injuries at Coastal Communities Hospital in Santa Ana.

Fears over food poisoning led the Orange County Health Care Agency to print special handbooks for food workers that include tips on preserving foods should an outage last two hours or more.

In Westminster, the anticipation kept businessman Calvin Qui Ngo on edge.

“There is a lot of anxiety,” said Ngo, 56, property manager for the Mall of Fortune on Westminster Avenue near Little Saigon. “We know we’re going to lose power. The problem is when.”

Ngo spent Monday morning cruising the complex of shops asking merchants to set their refrigerators to cool a little less, and to dim whatever lights they could.

“I see them using all this power, just letting all their lights go,” Ngo said. “I’m here to tell them to conserve. That’s all I can do.”

For emergency planners, there wasn’t much to be done either. An earthquake calls for one set of responses, massive El Nino-style storms another. A series of short blackouts, though, amounts to a mass of mosquitoes that won’t go away.

The Orange County Public Facilities and Resources Department, for example, has a stockpile of as many as 300 portable stop signs at its Anaheim maintenance yard. You would think they could drop them at intersections where the traffic lights have gone out. But they don’t.

Primarily because they haven’t been asked, said Ken R. Smith, deputy director of the public facilities department. But also because an hour is hardly enough time to mobilize, judging by their experience in putting out signs where signals have malfunctioned.

“Typically, what happens is by the time we get the stop sign out there, the signal’s been repaired,” Smith said, adding that state traffic laws already cover the issue. “The motor vehicle code says that when lights aren’t working at an intersection, it automatically reverts to a four-way stop.”

Restaurateur Alan Zemek, 43, approached the day with a mix of dread and deja vu. His Split Rock Tavern in Laguna Hills went dark at lunchtime Sunday when an underground cable failed. On Monday, Southern California Edison pulled the plug on purpose--again, at lunch time.

On Tuesday, he was mulling buying 2,000 pounds of ice to keep his meat stocks cooled should the plug be pulled again.

“This power crisis is no longer in the abstract. It is very real,” Zemek said. “There’s a lot of anxiety to that. It is not so much from losing power, but it is the anxiety about when the power is going to come back on.”

Darkness descended up and down the economic scale, striking working-class neighborhoods in northeast Santa Ana and, to the south, areas of South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa.

At a Santa Ana Food 4 Less, workers were forced to restock goods when the power died Tuesday morning and rendered scanners and cash registers useless. At South Coast Plaza, the lights went out for less than a minute--long enough to jolt the computers at Diesel, an upscale jeans shop.

“Our computers went blank,” manager Laura Fesperman said. “We had to call New York to have them help us.”

Managers of amusement parks found nothing amusing about what the summer might be like, with power outages already cropping up in the dawning days of spring.

“I hear this summer’s going to be kind of tricky when it comes to power, and I think that’s going to be our biggest challenge,” said Allan Ansdell, president of Adventure City in Stanton.

Ansdell said the park does not have a backup power supply, but that all rides are equipped with fail-safe devices that will stop them and allow for their manual operation.

“Fortunately, they’ve been turning the power off for just an hour,” Ansdell said. “If the power goes out for three or four hours though, that will be a problem.”

Disneyland also escaped outages, but was ready with a mix of backup generators, manual overrides and other emergency procedures, said spokeswoman Chela Castano-Lenahan.

An outage would cause more trouble at that refuge for the modern adolescent, the video arcade. At Fullerton’s The Reagan Years, co-owner Sean Francis kept an eye on news reports of where the outages were occurring. One struck just a quarter-mile away on Monday.

If a blackout hits, all 44 of his vintage 1980s machines would shut down, forcing him to refund game players’ quarters. Francis considered buying a generator but rejected it as too expensive for, in essence, an hour’s worth of power insurance.

“I feel like somebody is liable for this,” he said. “And how fair is that? You pay your bills and they’re supposed to provide service, and then they can cut you off without any warning.”

Mohammed Shamsi, owner of Discount Mart near Wilshire and Raymond in Fullerton, has already been working under his own self-imposed outage, this one driven by the bills he’s been receiving. Bills that once ran $250 a month have reached $385 a month.

So he has shut off the air-conditioner in his discount goods shop and sits in the dark. When a customer comes in he springs up from behind the counter and turns on a large floor fan and the lights. When the customer leaves, he turns them off again.

Tuesday morning, he was busy moving merchandise back into the darkened shop after doing some renovations.

“It only makes me hotter, but what choice do I have now?” he said. “I never thought I’d be paying $385, and I can’t afford [it].”

Workers at Norm’s family restaurant in Huntington Beach were preparing for the unthinkable: an outage that would make a lie of the big neon sign on the side of the building bragging that “We Never Close.”

If the power goes out, said general manager Betsy Fisher, they’d serve customers already in the restaurant but lock the door to others.

Which would put at least that moment down in Norm’s history.

“The only time Norm’s actually closed was when Kennedy died and Norm died,” she said. “And that was it.”

Times staff writers Stanley Allison, Matthew Ebnet, Dennis McLellan, Monte Morin, Jason Song and Nancy Wride contributed to this report.

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Blackouts Hit O.C. Again

From 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, parts of these 14 cities were affected by rolling blackouts that once again swept Orange County.

Buena Park

Yorba Linda

Placentia

Garden Grove

Westminster