The outage left thousands of homes without power and caused the closure of Malibu businesses.
By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times
A construction mishap on Malibu Canyon Road Saturday afternoon caused a four-hour long power outage that snarled traffic and disrupted businesses and residents.
Power to about 5,000 residences was lost along the coast from Malibu Canyon Road east to Big Rock, as well as some inland locations as far north as the Ventura freeway. Stores and restaurants at Cross Creek Road and in the Malibu Colony Shopping Plaza were evacuated and the establishments closed during the outage.
The outage was triggered at 3:06 p.m. when a guywire (anchor) was severed and a pole toppled on Malibu Canyon Road near Harbor Vista Drive. A contractor’s dump truck hit the wire, which snapped and allowed a wooden pole supporting a 16,000-volt transmission line to fall over, said a Los Angeles County Public Works Department official.
The truck that hit the line was dumping dirt from the Hume Road landslide stabilization project into a county-owned fill area near the Hughes Research Laboratory.
“We try to coordinate closely with the utilities, but this truck just clipped the guywire and the pole came down,” said county spokesman Ken Pellman. “Our crews were out on a Saturday afternoon working hard on that landslide removal project.”
Sheriff’s deputies and Fire Department dispatchers said there were no major incidents as a result of the outage, other than traffic that was heavy even by weekend beach standards. Eastbound travelers on Pacific Coast Highway were delayed nearly an hour as cars inched toward blacked-out traffic signals at Las Flores Road, witnesses said.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Phillip Brooks said deputies couldn’t be spared for traffic-directing duties on weekends, when staffing levels are low.
“If at all possible, we’ll take control of an intersection, and if that outage had been of a longer duration, we could have brought in extra deputies from other areas to help out,” he said.
Traffic signals along the highway at Webb Way and Las Flores Canyon Road were knocked out, but the signals at Carbon Canyon and Cross Creek roads functioned through the outage. Those signals were the only illumination during the night along five miles of eerily darkened Malibu coast until full service was restored at about 7:30 p.m.