ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, August 12, 1996 TAG: 9608120089
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
NOTE: Above
AN EMERGENCY MEETING will take place to determine if increased demand for electricity is to blame for the second major outage out West in six weeks.
As vast swaths of the Western United States recuperated Sunday from the second massive power failure in six weeks, federal energy officials called an emergency meeting for today to address whether the region's energy grid has been overwhelmed by burgeoning demand.
The outage Saturday, which stretched from Canada to New Mexico and knocked out power to 4 million customers in the midst of a triple-digit heat wave, was believed to have been caused by a combination of unusually high demand and heat-bloated transmission lines outside a tiny town near the Oregon border - lines that sagged into trees and set off a cascade of power shut-downs.
The chain of outages left homes without air conditioning and electric lights, trapped people in elevators and snarled traffic up and down the West Coast. By Sunday, power had been restored in nearly all the affected areas, but normalcy was harder to regain.
Engineers had to plug away all weekend to reset the thousands of stoplights that went on the blink. Timed sprinklers whirled into action at the wrong hours. ATM scanners at gas pumps remained inoperable in some areas. A 10-mile stretch of beach in Southern California was closed after an outage-related spill at the Hyperion sewage treatment plant.
At Manhattan Beach, Calif., where a national televised professional volleyball tournament featuring the Olympic men's gold and silver medal teams was being played, lifeguards warned the throngs to stay out of the surf.
Western utility officials said power failures such as the one Saturday are rare, and that it was a sign of the efficacy of their contingency plans that power was up and running within hours in most spots.
But as recently as July 2, another brief but widespread outage knocked out electricity to 2 million customers in 14 states. The cause, according to an Aug. 2 report, was strikingly similar to Saturday's: a tree in Idaho that fell on a power line.
In that report to President Clinton, the U.S. Department of Energy said that in the Western states the specific equipment failures and deficiencies that contributed to the July 2 outage had been dealt with and probably wouldn't cause such a problem again.
Eight days after the report was released, one of the largest outages on record occurred. On Sunday, officials questioned whether the back-to-back emergencies were a sign that the demand for power in the West may be overtaxing the delivery system.
Customer demand in the region has increased 20 percent in the past 10 years, said Dennis Eyre, executive director of the Western Systems Coordinating Council, an industry group formed to promote reliable electrical service.
Eyre said that utilities have addressed that demand by setting up a system of regional power grids that allow cities to swap electricity during times of peak demand. But it was during such a transfer that the outage occurred, and Eyre predicted that the antidote to a repeat of Saturday's shutdown might mean a limit on the amount of power that can be transferred from state to state - a constraint that would probably translate into higher electric bills.
Other officials called for similarly expensive improvements in the grid's contingency mechanisms.
``We may need a greater backup system. Situations that were once freak may be becoming more common,'' said Dulcy Mahar, spokeswoman for the Oregon-based Bonneville Power Administration, which operates a section of the region's grid.
The system is designed to help avert crises like the New York City blackout of 1965, when massive demand for power during a heat wave darkened the Eastern Seaboard for 13 chaotic hours. The grid allows local utilities to share power during periods of peak use, so that Southern California, for instance, can draw on cheap electricity from the Pacific Northwest for air conditioning during the dog days of August, and Seattle can pull power from Phoenix to ward off the winter chill.
LENGTH: Medium: 77 linesby CNB