City lights go out in 61st power outage

DOWNTOWN ? The lights went out in Glendale Tuesday for the 61st time this year, and some residents are getting fed up.

About 2,300 Glendale Water and Power customers in the North Central Avenue area lost power at about 10:15 a.m. Tuesday, city spokesman Ritch Wells said.

The blackout, which affected homes in the foothills south of Nesmuth Road as far down as Glenoaks Boulevard, was caused by a faulty cable running beneath Valley View Road between Lorraine Street and Kenneth Road, Wells said. Most of the homes affected had power restored just after 11 a.m., with the rest back up by 12:05 p.m., he said.

It took several tries for city workers to correct the problem, Wells said. Resident Steve Billnitzer, whose home was affected by the outage, noticed the struggles to get power back up.

“It would go on for a half-hour, and then back off,” Billnitzer said. “I am a writer and I work from home, so losing my power is a bit of an inconvenience.”

His area seems to have outages every few months, as of late, Billnitzer said.

“I’ve lived in Detroit, in Toledo, where there are heavy winter storms and snow, and I don’t recall getting power outages like this,” he said. “Here, we have better weather and I don’t understand why this happens. It comes to the point that it looks to me like somebody is not doing their job, at least in terms of prevention.”

Of the 61 outages reported in the city so far this year, more than 30 have been weather-related, Wells said.

“Only three have been caused by equipment failure, and seven have been caused by trees ? either a downed tree, branch or palm frond,” Wells said. “If you eliminated the weather-related outages and outages caused by trees, you would be left with very few blackouts.”

But even with this year’s constant rains, Glendale’s incidence of power outages lags far behind its neighbor Burbank, where there have been only four or five outages so far this year, said Greg Simay, assistant general manager of distribution at Burbank Water and Power.

“We did a study and, on average, our individual customers experience an outage about once every two years,” Simay said. “Statistically, we are doing pretty well.”

And while there were no figures available this year for Pasadena, spokeswoman Ann Erdman said that residents of her city experienced a total of 33 unplanned outages in all of 2005, even after factoring in last year’s record rains.

“That averages about 2.75 per month,” said Erdman, whose city covers 22.5 square miles, compared to Glendale’s 30.6 square miles.

Compared to last year’s storms, this year’s rains have been spread out through several months, affecting Glendale’s power infrastructure for a longer period of time, Wells said.

“Last year it was pretty much concentrated in January; this year we started in January and it is still going on,” he said, adding that the city is in the second year of a planned five-year, $40-million upgrade of its power system.

“Once that upgrade has been completed, we believe we will drastically reduce the number of outages we are incurring,” Wells said.

“For example, we are going in to replace the entire 1,500-foot-long cable that caused today’s outage with a higher- quality cable.”

So far, $25 million of the total $40 million that the city is investing into the power grid has been spent, Wells said.

QUESTION

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