Power Outage Leaves Downtown LA Criminal Courthouse In The Dark

LOS ANGELES, CA — The power is back on at the t the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles, after an outage left half the courtrooms in the dark, halting proceedings in criminal cases Monday morning.

A power outage created safety challenges and forced court officials to block the entrances to the building and delay hearings.

Power went out shortly before 10:30 a.m. in about half of the courtrooms and offices in the building at 210 W. Temple St. A court employee in the building indicated that a generator had failed, but there was no official word on the cause of the outage.

Entrances to the building were blocked, but there did not appear to be any effort to evacuate people already inside. Court hearings appeared to be continuing in courtrooms that did not lose power. Officials in darkened courtrooms were looking to move to other rooms so hearings can be held.

City News Service and Patch Staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report. Photo: Shutterstock