Tuesday, July 25, 2000

Power Outage Hits Wide Area of Westside

INGLEWOOD--Tree trimmers whose hydraulic boom brushed against a 220,000-volt electric line were blamed Monday for a power failure that knocked out electricity to 120,000 homes and businesses in Inglewood, Beverly Hills, Culver City, West Hollywood and Santa Monica, Southern California Edison officials said.

The power failure occurred at about 1:20 p.m. It lasted about four minutes in most areas but lingered more than an hour in other areas. Traffic signals in some cities, including Beverly Hills, were left disabled for more than an hour after power was restored until municipal crews could reset timers.

In Santa Monica, startled lunchtime diners at a top-floor cafeteria were stranded until they found a catwalk that led across the courthouse rooftop to a stairway that descended to the building's holding-cell area. Edison spokesman Tom Boyd said no one was reported injured at the tree-trimming site. He said Monday's outage was not weather-related.

http://www.latimes.com/news/state/20000725/t000069816.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 25, 2000

Answers

Tuesday, July 25, 2000

Power Outage Result Of Demand People on L-A's west side experienced a big power outage yesterday afternoon due to the heavy demand for electricity in the heat. California Edison spokesperson Gil Alexander says it affected several communities. A stage one emergency was declared this morning and Edison is calling on all of its customers to conserve power tomorrow.

LOS ANGELES

http://home.digitalcity.com/santabarbara/news/article.dci? provider=metronetworks&category=News&article=532289

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 25, 2000.

Note the above 2 stories. This is about the same power outage with the 1st story saying it was not weather related. The second story say it was heat related. Hard to believe what you read now days>

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 25, 2000.

What a PR foul-up. It's like the left hand not knoweth what the right hand doeth.

-- Uncle Fred (dogboy45@bigfoot.com), July 25, 2000.

It seems to be coming to pass. I predicted late last year that the power outages would not come as of Jan. 1, when only 50% of the grid was used, but by mid-summer, when 95% of capacity was taxed.

It's happening--and for just about every reason under the sun given, but for y2k. Sure makes you wonder: how much does y2k have to do with it?

-- JackW (jpayne@webtv.net), July 25, 2000.

Something sure as hell is going on. We've had three power outages of an hour or more in the past three months. Before that we hadn't had an outage of more than 10 minutes in fifteen years. And, these were before the hot weather.

It looks like there is a lot to contemplate about all this power stuff - a lot more than meets the eye.

-- Loner (Loner@bigfoot.com), July 25, 2000.

I think it's too much a stretch of the imagination that all of these outages are merely the result of dissipation of resources. If this were the case the outages would be more evolutionary, that is, they would be coming on much more gradually than they are.

-- Chance (fruitloops@Hotmail.com), July 25, 2000.

I'll bet this is just the beginning....and that over the coming days and weeks we're going to be getting power outages that will curl our hair.

-- R2D2 (r2d2@earthend.net), July 25, 2000.

I have a niece who lives in Southern California, and she says that her power supply has been acting crazy for the past three or four months or so. She says she's endured several power outages lasting a few minutes to forty five minutes, and many of these were before the hot weather even set in.

-- LillyLP (lillyLP@aol.com), July 25, 2000.