September 2024 heat forced rotating outages in Watts and Green Meadows

Outages across Los Angeles

At 6 p.m. on Sept. 8, 2024, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power reported 15,208 customers without power, out of its 1.5 million electric customers. Its area outage tally listed Harvard Park, Hollywood and Northridge as the communities with the most impacted customers. The utility also reported that 92,912 customers had been restored since the storm began. [1]

Rotating outages in two communities

At 4:30 p.m. that day, Distributing Station 27, which serves parts of Watts and Green Meadows, overloaded amid high demand intensified by extreme heat. LADWP began 30- and 60-minute rotating outages in parts of the neighborhoods to prevent a complete area outage. The utility estimated they would continue through 8 p.m. [1]

Crews worked at the station to reduce equipment temperature and prevent permanent damage. LADWP said customers experiencing outages could face crew response times longer than 24 hours because of the high number of smaller outages. It prioritized the longest-running interruptions and larger circuit outages affecting the most customers. [1]

Longer restoration work

LADWP said it was in direct contact with residential customers who had been without power for more than 30 hours and was working to deliver ice to them. That update described some customers’ circumstances; it did not say that every account affected by the heat storm had been without power that long. [1]

In its Sept. 11 final update, LADWP said the system was recovering. The department reported that crews had worked 16-hour shifts in temperatures above 100 degrees since Friday, and said permanent repairs would continue over the following days in places where temporary repairs had been made to restore service more quickly. [2]