Thursday, September 15, 2005

Final - I Promise! - Update On Power Outage!

The latest excuse, excuse me - reason - for the recent power outage was that it was all due to rogue paperwork!

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dwp16sep16,1,7259438.story?coll=la-headlines-california

Patrick McGreevy
Times Staff Writer

September 16, 2005

An inaccurate work order led a crew to cut the lines that caused Monday's power outage to 2 million people in Los Angeles, the city's Department of Water and Power has determined.

"It was a case of miscommunication," Henry Martinez, an assistant general manager for the DWP, said Thursday.

DWP engineers who planned the replacement of a control system at a Toluca Lake receiving station specified that a bundle of three charged lines should be left intact, but work drawings handed to the crew called for the lines to be cut and removed, Martinez said.

The wire cutters used by the work crew closed a circuit between two live wires, triggering circuit breakers that shut down the receiving station and began the power outage, he said.

This also - finally - clarifies the confusion of whether it was the cutting of the wires that did the damage or if it was the worker then afterwards putting the wrong wires together. Now it appears that when the wire cutter cut through the insulation of the bundled wires - the metal implement is what closed the circuit between still live wires, thus making the cutting and the putting together of the wrong wires a simultaneous act.

Case closed!

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