This Power Outage Puts DWP in the Dark

It didn’t take much creativity Monday for officials with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to imagine what their customers endure when the electricity goes out.

That’s because lights dimmed and elevators stopped at the DWP’s headquarters on North Hope Street, just as they did at other office buildings in Los Angeles’ downtown Civic Center area, during a late-morning power outage. In all, 71,200 customers -- including City Hall, Los Angeles police headquarters and several Fire Department stations -- had service interrupted for up to 15 minutes before power was fully restored at 11:56 a.m.

Gale Harris, a DWP spokeswoman, didn’t see any irony in the snafu. “We, of course, wondered what happened,” she said, later adding: “We’re customers just like everyone else.”

Officials late Monday still were investigating the cause of the outage, but said it stemmed from transformer problems at a DWP electrical receiving station on North Main Street, north of downtown.

A city Fire Department spokesman said the power outage triggered numerous calls about traffic light and elevator problems, and set off automatic fire alarms, but didn’t lead to any injuries or other major difficulties.

This was the second time in two weeks that the Civic Center was struck by an outage. On Aug. 2, a 20-minute power interruption affected 4,000 customers.

A far smaller outage hit Pacific Palisades. It cut power from 11 a.m. into the evening to customers including the Getty Villa and Palisades Charter High School. DWP officials linked the incident to problems with an underground transmission line.