LA Blackout Roundup

A little less than 24 hours after wide swaths of Los Angeles were left without power yesterday, a number of folks are asking pointed questions about the hows and whys of the blackout, which was apparently caused by worker error:

A mistake on a single bundle of wires Monday cascaded into a major blackout in and around Los Angeles, inconveniencing millions of people and renewing questions about the vulnerability of the region's power system...

The mistake rippled through the electrical grid, threatening to overload another transmission station and two electrical generating plants: the Scattergood generating station south of Los Angeles International Airport and the Haynes generating station near Long Beach.

The DWP shut down the generating facilities to avoid damage, sharply reducing the amount of power available to the city. That caused blackouts in neighborhoods across the city, with heavy concentrations in parts of the San Fernando Valley, South Los Angeles and the downtown area. All of Burbank's 52,000 customers and half of Glendale's 80,000 also lost power. Both cities' electrical systems are linked to the DWP.

With the power out, the job of explaining the outage fell to LADWP's Ron Deaton:

The veteran civil servant stood calmly in front of the DWP headquarters on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles with a giant map of the power grid, trying to explain why it was actually good news that so much of the city was without power.

"The system was doing what it was supposed to do," Deaton told a television reporter, explaining that power was switched off to protect the system from being greatly damaged.

"It's better to shut it down than to burn out the whole system," he said.

Christopher Swope has some thoughts on Deaton's performance. Here's a map of how the outage cascaded throughout the area. When the power goes out, many of the modern conveniences we rely on, like broadband Internet access, fall to the wayside:

Another tool of modern life — high-speed Internet connections — was knocked out in some parts of the city because of the outage. Patti Rockenwegner, a spokesperson for Comcast, which provides cable and broadband Internet service to about 500,000 customers in Southern California, said some customers in Hollywood and South Los Angeles lost service for about 40 minutes when the outage tripped fuses.

As was reported elsewhere, Los Angeles-based Web hosting provider Dreamhost was knocked offline for several hours, taking a number of bloggers with it.

Here's a map of how the outage cascaded throughout the area.

With the power out, a number of LA-based refineries were forced to burn off petroleum products:

The controlled fires, or flares, were visible for miles and triggered air quality alerts in neighborhoods surrounding the refineries. They prompted a small number of emergency room visits from residents who complained of illnesses they said were caused by the fires. While commuters and residents of communities such as Wilmington are familiar with the spectacle, the burn-offs rarely occur in such numbers and at the same time...

Gasoline is produced under great pressure and heat. When refineries lose power, that pressure needs to be released. The petroleum product is sent up tall stacks, where it is burned off by the stack-top flares, causing flames and heavy smoke. The burn-off is a safety mechanism that prevents chemicals from spreading through the refinery, officials said.

The paper has set up a message board and asked LA residents to share their experiences -- some more interesting than others. For a more humorous take on the outage, check out Bridget Johnson.

Bill Quick is annoyed:

I can almost write this story in my sleep. It hasn't changed in a generation. Some piddling switch or transformer or relay blows a gasket, and ever-widening cascades of failure eventually destroy the power to thousands of square miles and millions of people.

The fact is, our national power grid is an antiquated mess. And much of our other infrastructure, from roads and rails to power, transport, and shipping systems, is a rickety joke. Yet what do we spend money on?

A good question. The fact is, America has been underspending on energy infrastructure for a long, long time.

For our roundup on the blackout from yesterday, click here. And before I forget, thanks to Cal Energy Blog for many of the pointers we used during the blackout.

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