Haines His Way

DR MBARNUM if you can win a contest without entering then you are really lucky!

For DR RonP or any other cooking experts.

You were mentioning grilling pans a couple of weeks ago. Do you actually have one? And if so is it square or round?  And do you have the recipe you were talking about for steaks?

According to the newscaster, the outage was affecting Glendale, Burbank, Studio City, North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks, downtown LA, West Los Angeles, and they also said that two terminals at LAX had been affected. The latter, of course, made no sense whatsoever, and an hour later they said that the airport had not, in fact, been affected.

An hour later they finally revealed the problem, which they’d known since the minute it happened – some worker (read boob) had inadvertently cut the wrong power line. I would like someone to explain to me exactly what he was doing cutting power lines, and how such a mistake could happen. I would like someone to explain to me how the DWP has no backup system for such an emergency. I would like someone to explain to me why a cut line in Burbank would shut down power to two million people.

The power flickered for a few moments at Los Angeles International Airport before emergency generators kicked in. No flights were delayed, airport spokespeople said.
A backup generator also powered the air traffic control tower at the airport for about an hour.

- 12:37 p.m. A worker cuts through wrong wires, apparently triggering a short circuit. The mishap occurs during installation of a system meant to better sense voltage fluctuations. Station E in Toluca Lake shuts down.

- Station S automatically shuts down in response to changes at Station E.

- Scattergood and Haynes, two of the DWP's four generating plants, stop transmitting to the system.

- Within three to five minutes, the DWP management is notified.

- The DWP contains the problem by manually shutting down power in some areas of the city.

- About 1:30 p.m., DWP management learns of the causes for the blackout.

- 2 p.m. Power is restored to 90% of affected customers.

The automated system workers were installing was meant to detect surges or drops in voltage, said Ed Miller, the DWP's director of power systems, operations and maintenance.

"They cut a bundle of wires," Miller said. "The supposition is that by cutting them together, they created a short that triggered the circuit breakers." Miller said cutting wires one by one might have avoided an electrical short.

Ironically, the system the work crew was trying to install would have identified the power problem much more quickly, Miller said. It would be able to "decipher just what had happened." As it happened, DWP engineers needed an hour to determine where in the system the outage began.

California receives much of its power from lines running down the coast from the Pacific Northwest, and from an eastern line through Utah, said Robert Lasseter, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

California's system appears better-designed than many, Lasseter said, because the failure in Los Angeles didn't leave the rest of the state in the dark, as happened across the Northeast during the massive, regionwide blackout in the summer of 2003.

The local grid, however, is a tightly knit network in which an isolated failure can ripple across the system, power experts say.

A decade ago, hot weather caused power lines near a tiny Oregon town to sag into a tree, plunging much of California and the West into darkness.

Last month, a faulty sensor at a new power transfer station in Sylmar caused neighborhoods throughout Southern California to lose power.

"Blackouts and power systems are just like forest fires: You can minimize them, you can localize them, but you can't stop them," Lasseter said.

"If L.A. gets [power running] in an hour or so … is that a major risk or not? How many billions of dollars do you want to put in to make sure that happens half as often?"

There was little political will in Los Angeles last week to pay for improvements. The City Council, by a 9-4 vote, rejected a $1.2-billion bond that the DWP wanted to issue to upgrade its power infrastructure.

The plan was to have up to $950 million of the bonds go to capital improvements for the power system.

Up to $250 million would have gone toward the purchase of a natural gas field to serve as a power reserve.

Of course, no one will be explaining anything, which is life per usual for the DWP and the country at large.

I just did something really stupid. My friend and I were supposed to go to Pennsylvania to see one of our ALADDIN kids in a production of JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH on Sunday. Having completely forgotten, I just booked a ticket for myself to see THE LION KING on Sunday night.

I'M SUCH AN IDIOT!!! I feel really bad, and the LION KING ticket is no refund/no exchange, so I won't be going to PA.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!