Los Angeles Power Outages

[MissQueenie]

Holy smokes! We just had a whopper of an outage here in L.A. -- power out all over the city including the valley and all the way east into Fontana! I was just packing up to head home (our collegues at Natural History already closed up shop and took off) when the power surged again and came back on. It was sort of fun, sitting around in the office in the dark (our admin offices used to house the museum proper when I was a kid). Now the lights and computers and coffee makers all work again -- back to the grind!

 

[Dahlia]

Wow... where in LA are you? I'm in my office in Irvine and we weren't affected by it, so I assume it was pretty contained. Must've been an interesting break from work.

 

[Miss Neecerie]

From the news reports...

It was LA Dept of Water and Power ....so OC wouldnt be affected.


Denise...who lives downtown ( about 10 blocks from where Miss Queenie works) and works in OC

 

[MissQueenie]

Bah My reply was eaten by the server.

Short version of all the gossip I've heard so far: the news seems to think the outage was caused by some poor sap at DWP cutting the wrong line. One of my girlfriends mentioned that there had been an al Qaeda threat this morning from someone in O.C. saying that L.A. and Melbourne Australia were next on the hitlist and that people in her office (and all over town) were freaking out. CNN states that so far there has been no evidence of terrorist activity (big surprise), but the police etc are on high alert, just in case.

Denise, where-abouts do you live? I didn't know I had a fellow FL'er so close! I'm over by Vernon and Crenshaw, about 5-10 min from Exposition park.

 

[Miss Neecerie]

I live between Figueroa and Hoover...and Adams and 23rd...

 

[elsewhere]

weird... it hit all the way to fontana... but no effect here!

we're in Norwalk.. right between bellflower/whittier/cerritos

odd how the actions of just one person can affect so many!

 

[MissQueenie]

It's the way the power grids are set up. I had to hear by boyfriend bellyaching about the stupidity of the design -- from what I could make out, the grid is designed so that when one line fails, the places on that line are connected to other neighboring lines so that they won't lose power. In theory, this is a good idea, but in practice what tends to happen is that the neighboring lines can't handle the new load and also fail causing a sort of domino effect so that whole areas of the city are dark. Apparently, it was a very cheap solution, and my boyfriend seems to think that it could be redesigned to better effect, except that the city is loathe to spend money on it.

Oh, and I guess the al Qaeda thing was just *aired* yesterday in response to the 9-11 anniversary, so who knows when it was actually taped.

 

[shamus]

in the words of a great man... there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

 

[MissQueenie]

I'm always amazed by how many people are sucked into being afraid of things like that. I shun television, especially television news -- I prefer to get my information from a slightly less hysterical source like the papers or radio. Newscasting is just ridiculous these days -- aimed at people with no attention span and it's so "spun" that it's hard to detangle fact from "presentational style." Not that the papers are less bad, but at least it's more obvious, and one knows what biases to expect in one's every day paper, and can interpret what one reads accordingly.

 

[Lauren]

Agreed. The more you get people riled up the more news they want, the more money the newspeople make.