Power Outage Leaves Thousands in the Dark, Others in Gridlock

About 29,000 Department of Water and Power customers in the Pacific Palisades, Westwood and West Los Angeles areas were left without power for about two hours this afternoon -- and scores of drivers were stuck in gridlocked traffic -- after a circuit breaker failed and caused a small fire at a DWP receiving station.

The equipment failed at 1:37 p.m. and a portion of the receiving station that services the affected areas was de-energized about 10 minutes later, according to DWP spokeswoman Ellen Cheng.

Firefighters responded at 2:27 p.m. to a report of an explosion in a DWP yard in the 1800 block of Centinela Avenue, according to Margaret Stewart of the Los Angeles Fire Department.

A circuit breaker had caused a small fire that was already out by the time firefighters arrived, Stewart said.

“Two power distributing station serving local areas were impacted and are currently out of service, affecting the areas of Westwood and the Pacific Palisades the most,” according to a DWP statement.

The outage caused traffic lights to malfunction, triggering massive backups at some major intersections.

The DWP announced at 3:38 p.m. that service had been restored all affected customers.

City News Service