A splice of life

LOS ANGELES SQUIRMED WITH UNCERTAINTY Monday afternoon while its Department of Water and Power tried to pinpoint the source of a burgeoning outage, which spread from neighborhood to neighborhood like a fire tearing through a dry forest. The cause, once found, generated guffaws of relief. It wasn’t a well-placed bomb, it was just a Three Stooges moment -- some guy with cable cutters who got too enthusiastic.

That’s the way it used to be with power outages. We would sit in the dark and wait to hear what dimwit in which power station hit the wrong switch. But after California’s 2000-2001 energy crisis and its seemingly endless rolling blackouts, and then the terror attacks of 9/11, our assumptions turned darker.

When the power suddenly cut off Monday, minds leaped to the extremes. Was it the handiwork of Osama bin Laden’s minions, as a former Riverside County farm boy turned Al Qaeda mouthpiece had threatened on Sunday? Was it Armageddon for an overloaded and aged transmission system?

In fact, it was neither. Instead, it was a comeuppance for a city that smugly evaded not only the rolling blackouts of the state energy crisis but also the outages caused last month by a glitch at the DWP’s own power transfer station in Sylmar.

The incident reminded Angelenos that their seemingly sturdy, self-contained municipal power system can still be brought to its knees in seconds by a single human error.

That’s not a comforting thought in the post-9/11 era, when we have to worry about misdeeds as well as mishaps.

The outage leaves plenty of reliability issues to ponder for DWP chief Ron Deaton, the city’s former chief legislative analyst who’s had the post for less than a year. By Tuesday, Deaton was already promising the City Council that he would hire independent engineers to design a new system that would do a better job of isolating problems, rather than triggering broad shutdowns. Ironically, the worker who triggered Monday’s outage was installing equipment that would help the DWP trace and respond more quickly to problems.

Still, such an overhaul won’t be cheap. What’s more, it would be prohibitively expensive to build an electrical grid with so many backups and safeguards that it would resist any and all human errors.

The real tragedy is how reassuring human error can be when the nation is reeling from a natural disaster and unnerved by the specter of terrorism. Monday’s blackout harkened back to a more innocent time: Curly holds the cable, Moe makes the cut and Larry smacks his forehead.