Power was restored Saturday after an explosion at an underground electrical vault left thousands of homes and businesses in the Fairfax Village area in the dark for at least 12 hours.
Power was restored at 4:40 a.m. in an area that included the Park La Brea apartment complex, The Grove shopping and entertainment center, and Cedars- Sinai Medical Center, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power reported.
The explosion occurred Friday as DWP crews worked to restore service following an outage that began Thursday afternoon and cut electricity to about 3,500 customers, according to the utility. The blast left four people with minor injuries and shattered glass at nearby businesses.
Firefighters were sent at Friday to the 8400 block of West Beverly Boulevard to tend to the injured, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
The four people — three males and a female, all customers at two nearby businesses — were evaluated at the scene and declined to be taken to a hospital, according to the fire department.
As a result of the blast, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center put emergency power generators into use and announced that “non-emergency procedures may be postponed.” There were also reports that the hospital’s elevators were not working.
Friday afternoon’s failure involved “a different circuit in the same vault, serving the same community … ,” the DWP reported. “The force of that incident caused windows to shatter in front of a business near West Beverly Boulevard and North Alfred Street.”
The blast appeared to have caused “only cosmetic damage and no structural compromise,” the LAFD reported.
—City News Service