LOS ANGELES -- A major blackout, apparently caused by a malfunction in a 500,000-volt power line in Northern California, struck seven Western states stretching from the Northwest to the Mexican border at dusk Wednesday.
Although lights only flickered in many areas, and power was restored after a few minutes in others, some sections including parts of Los Angeles and other major cities remainedwithout service more than two hours later.
Other districts had power cut off temporarily as 'rolling blackouts' were purposely initiated to reduce the risk of a single massive outage.
The blackouts and related problems affected millions of people including residents of several major cities, but police and fire officials reported few problems except for minor traffic accidents and some rescues of people trapped in elevators.
A Pacific Gas & Electric Co. spokeswoman said the exact cause of the blackout would not be known for several days, but said it apparently involved an 'interruption or disturbance' on a power line near a substation at Round Mountain near Redding, Calif., 100 miles south of the Oregon border.
'A circuit breaker tripped,' Carole Horne said. 'It shouldn't take long to fix.'
The outage occurred at about 5:45 p.m. PST, at the height of the evening rush hour in Los Angeles and other cities.
Several newspapers and television and radio stations were blacked out and many hospitals and police agencies, including the California Highway Patrol offices in Hollywood and the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, were forced to switch to emergency power.
'It's dark all the way to the mountains,' said a worker in a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles, referring to the San Gabriel Mountains 15 miles away, shortly after the initial power loss.
'Everything to the north is pitch black. You can only see the stars.'
Much of San Diego, California's second largest city, also lost power.
There were few problems in San Francisco, but blackouts were reported in surrounding areas including Marin County and Sonoma Valley to the north and the so-called Silicon Valley to the south. A brief outage affected commuters on the Bay Area Rapid Transit System.
Las Vegas, Nev., lost about a third of its power, but major resorts quickly switched to auxiliary power systems so gambling could continue.
The two largest cities in Arizona, Phoenix and Tucson, lost most of their power for nearly an hour.
There were also outages and other temporary problems throughout New Mexico, in parts of Texas including El Paso, and in Utah and Montana.
In metropolitan Los Angeles, the Department of Water and Power and Southern California Edison took emergency measures to avoid a total outage.
'When a problem like this occurs, power is 'shed' in order to avoid a massive outage,' Edison spokesman Charles Beal said. 'Some lines are automatically shut down to avoid the domino effect.
'If the lines are not closed, the circuit interruption knocks out one line, and the power has to go somewhere else and it knocks out that line and so on.
'We didn't end up with a New York City-type blackout because of the way our system is designed.'
