Power outage hits city

Major portions of Los Angeles and its surrounding cities, including

Burbank and Glendale, lost power Monday afternoon, when maintenance

workers at a Los Angeles station cut the wrong line, causing a domino

effect of power outages county wide, officials said.

Power was knocked out as far away as San Pedro, said Gale Harris,

spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Workers doing maintenance at a receiving station in North

Hollywood caused the blackout, Burbank Water and Power Assistant

General Manager Greg Simay said.

The receiving station is a “superhighway” of power that branches

out to other cities and neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Simay said.

“If you interrupt at that point you create a huge outage, Simay

said.

In downtown Burbank, customers and employees of businesses along

San Fernando Boulevard stood outside until after 2 p.m. when the

power was restored.

Several stores locked their doors, taping up hand-written signs

saying they would be closed while the power was out.

Burbank activated its Emergency Occupation Center at the Fire

Department’s training center.

There, representatives from the police, fire, public works and

streets department gathered to coordinate the city’s response.

The center was activated because the outage affected the whole

city and there was no indication when the power would be back on,

Burbank Police Lt. David Gabriel said.

“Our whole objective is to gain control and get ahead of the

situation,” Gabriel said.

Power to half of Glendale Water and Power’s 81,000 customers went

out just after 12:30 p.m. Monday, but was fully restored by 2 p.m.,

Glendale city spokesman Ritch Wells said.

“While we were getting everything to be self-sustaining, [Los

Angeles Department of Water and Power] reconnected with Glendale, and

that’s really where this whole thing started,” Wells said.

Eleven of Glendale’s 14 substations, which receive energy from Los

Angeles, went out, he said.

“We had the emergency lights on and we opened the doors,” Don Cuco

restaurant manager Ramon Martinez said, adding that his power was not

restored for about 20 minutes. “Some people were eating in the dark.

But it was almost the end of lunch so it didn’t affect us that much.”

“What it caused here was a citywide outage that caused numerous

fire alarms to go off and numerous elevator rescues,” Glendale Fire

Capt. Bill Lynch said.

Glendale Police were also busy responding to alarm systems going

off, but there were no safety concerns, Glendale Sgt. Tom Lorenz

said.

“We’ve just had an increase in calls for service for alarms, and

we have to respond to each one,” he said.

Montrose residents experienced only minimal effects -- a few stop

lights out -- Glendale firefighter paramedic Jim Coory said.

In La Crescenta only one street light went out at Pennsylvania

Avenue and Foothill Boulevard, Crescenta Valley Sheriffs said, and

there were no outages in La Canada Flintridge.