Underground Transformer Blasts Workers Into Air : Explosion, Fireball Burn Four Men

An explosion in an underground transformer vault blasted a 30-foot-high fireball through a manhole at a Costa Mesa intersection Thursday, blasting four workers through the air.

Three of the injured men were hospitalized with burns.

“It was like a bomb, when I was in Korea,” said Larry Crutcher, a salesman at a nearby auto dealership.

“Big, black smoke and then a big ball of flame. They were standing there and it blew two of them like 20 feet. One guy was just screaming.”

The blast at Harbor Boulevard and Fair Drive occurred at 8:30 a.m. as three Southern California Edison Co. workers and a city transportation employee were working on a 12,000-volt transformer that had been knocked out of service by a construction accident less than an hour earlier.

As his three co-workers watched, Edison foreman Gary Owsley probed the electrical vault beneath the sidewalk with a fiberglass pole, said Jim. E. Kennedy, an area manager for Edison.

The explosion flung the men across a dirt lot and displaced the 1,000-pound concrete vault cover, said Charlie Clarke, a city construction inspector.

Owsley, 36, suffered third-degree burns on his hands. Lou Gonzales, 42, suffered second-degree flash burns on 6% of his body. Both were in UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange, where Owsley was reported in stable condition and Gonzales in good condition.

Ray Navia, 39, the third Edison employee, was in stable condition at Costa Mesa Medical Center with first- and second-degree burns. Chris Dahl, 29, a Costa Mesa transportation department worker who suffered minor burns, was treated at the hospital and released, a spokeswoman said.

Rudy Karre, a mechanic at the nearby auto dealership, said he was talking to one of the workers when the man warned him to stand back. The vault erupted minutes later.

“I was standing around when the guy was turning the power on and he said, ‘You’d better get out of the way,’ ” Karre said. Seconds before the explosion, Karre said, Dahl ran from the vault.

Jim Jasmar, 18, of Costa Mesa said he was walking south on Harbor when he heard the workers utter profanities.

“I turned around, and the next thing was this boom,” he said. “Smoke went real high, about 40 feet high, like a big old mushroom cloud. I practically fell down.”

Heard Explosion

Mike Palencar, 14, was at home on Fordham Drive a quarter of a mile away when he heard the explosion.

“The power went off, then it came back on, then it went off again and then I heard a rumble,” Palencar said.

Paul Nequette, a business manager at the auto dealership, said he heard screams after the explosion.

“They were running around all over the place trying to look for fire extinguishers,” he said. “I tell you, the next guys who go down are going to be a little nervous.”

A spokesman for the Santa Ana contractor working at the site, Williams and Maher Inc., said he did not know what caused the initial power failure, which affected homes and businesses bounded by Harbor, Wilson Street, Fairview Road and Adams Street.

But Fire Capt. James Ellis said the outage occurred when workers hit an Edison electrical line while digging holes for light poles.