Explosion Sparks Raging Fires, Flying Glass

By Teresa Rochester

It was shortly after 4:30 a.m. when the first call came into Santa Monica's Fire Department: A transformer on a utility pole at 5th and Colorado had exploded in flames and blown off a high voltage wire. Moisture had seeped into a spot where underground and above ground wires meet, causing the blast.

But it was the second call the Fire Department received at 5:05 a.m. that would plunge sections of the City into darkness throughout the day and well into the night.

The explosion of the transformer had sparked a chain reaction. At a nearby underground switching station circuits overloaded causing a massive blast that blacked out one third of the City. The force of the blast sent a 2,000-pound manhole cover skyward, moving it six feet, as well as several steel manhole covers between 5th and 9th Streets.

As a fire engine accompanied by a paramedic squad contained the fire on 5th Street and Colorado Avenue another engine and ambulance arrived at the scene of the underground explosion to find fire shooting up from the ground.

"We had a raging fire," said Division Chief Mike Curtis. The Fire Department cordoned off the area and did not start putting out the blaze until receiving orders from a Southern California Edison supervisor, Curtis said.

"We didn't do anything. We didn't know what was down there," he said.

A power company supervisor arrived on the scene about half an hour after the blast and told firefighters to flood the vault that contained six or seven high voltage lines that carry between 4,000 to 16,000 volts of electricity.

Using the master stream hose on Engine 3, fire fighters flooded the blazing pit with water. They then applied foam to further quench the debris that was still smoldering an hour and a half later.

The blast blew out windows at Norm's Restaurant sending shards of glass raining down on three people who were outside the 24-hour diner. Paramedics treated a homeless man on the scene and released him. Another man refused treatment saying he would seek out help on his own.

The third victim, a Los Angeles Times employee, was loading papers into news racks when the blast occurred. She was also struck by flying glass and was transported to a local hospital in a private vehicle.

Curtis said the woman was lucky she was not in her van at the time of the blast. The electrical fire scorched her delivery truck and all of the newspapers inside.

Firefighters also attended to a number of accidents that occurred after traffic lights went out.