Art Bell said Friday night there was a power outage in LA. Has anyone seen any reports of this?

-- (infoman@web.com), January 10, 1999

Answers

Power was out for about a half hour in Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, Culver City, and maybe elsewhere along the coast. But not downtown or the San Fernando or other valleys.

Cranked up the trusty BayGen with LED light. Reports were that a high-voltage transmission line "went out" or something. Whatever that means.

Hard to say whether Y2K or just a typical outage. (Was it a test? :-) ) Power does go out for non-Y2K reasons, also. Local (block) transformers blowing, substation blowouts when it rains, etc., have all happened in addition to stuff like the "grid" blacking out the whole west coast.

-- from Santa Monica (one@inthecity.com), January 10, 1999.

According to my friend Tina, that was the third outage in her neighborhood (she lives in Santa Monica) in less than a week. The power was out for most of New Year's Eve.

scott

-- Scott Johnson (scojo@yahoo.com), January 10, 1999.

When power outages happen, probably the most important question to ask is whether it was the result of cascading -- i.e., the outage ended up affecting a much greater area than it should have, because the safeguards to contain the outage failed. This is exactly what happened in San Francisco a few weeks ago. And what Y2K promises to deliver on or about January 1, 2000.

-- Jack (jsprat@eld.net), January 10, 1999.

Thanks for that report - seen any news coverage or articles on the net? In all of my life I've never seen the power just go out unless it was caused by something like a storm or a tree falling on a line. This incident and the San Francisco one look awfully suspicous. I'm willing to bet it has something to do with upgrading to Y2K compliant systems. I do not think this indicates that we are necessarily going to see big power disasters, but later in the year there will be more and more of these brief interruptions as they change to new parts. At some point the truth will not be able to be kept under wraps any longer.

-- (infoman@web.com), January 10, 1999.

come on guys! Not everything is y2k related!!!

-- Moore Dinty moore (not@thistime.com), January 10, 1999.

Moore,

I will repeat, I've never seen the power go out except in severe weather, or if something breaks the line; car wreck, ice covered tree, etc.

They will have to upgrade some of the components and embedded chips that control switches and so forth, won't they? I'm not saying there is anything wrong with doing that, but it seems it may be difficult to carry out without SOME disconnections.

Do you have an explanation?

-- (infoman@web.com), January 10, 1999.