LA Power Outage

The crew did exactly as they had been told...

An inaccurate work order led a crew to cut the lines that caused Monday's power outage to 2 million people in Los Angeles, the city's Department of Water and Power has determined.

"It was a case of miscommunication," Henry Martinez, an assistant general manager for the DWP, said Thursday.

DWP engineers who planned the replacement of a control system at a Toluca Lake receiving station specified that a bundle of three charged lines should be left intact, but work drawings handed to the crew called for the lines to be cut and removed, Martinez said.

The wire cutters used by the work crew closed a circuit between two live wires, triggering circuit breakers that shut down the receiving station and began the power outage, he said.

The agency is still trying to determine who drafted the work drawings that differed from the engineers' plans.