The Daily News of Los Angeles

Los Angeles city officials said Friday they are still working to discover what went wrong earlier this month when power at a key communication center went down and caused a blackout to the LAPD dispatch system.

An angry Councilman Mitch Englander took officials from the General Services Department and Information Technology Agency to task for the problems that developed during maintenance of backup power systems on Mount Lee.

“We were lucky nothing major occurred,” Englander said. “This jeopardized safety for the public and for officers.”

General Services Director Tony Royster said it was a unique problem during the monthly work that shut down the system. Steps are being taken to determine what exactly went wrong and to work out a long-term program to avoid future problems.

Officials said the power was restored within minutes, but LAPD’s voice radio wasn’t up for four hours. It took additional time to bring all the dispatch consoles up and operating.

Technicians from the manufacturer of the power system are coming out next week to take apart the device to determine the cause of the problem.

Englander said the problem was exacerbated because the Valley Dispatch Center also was down.

“It defies common sense to do this work when the Valley Dispatch Center, our redundant system, was down,” Englander said. “We aren’t in the business of being lucky. The taxpayers have spent millions of dollars to make sure we have the best communication system we can.”

Englander said he also wanted reports resolving discrepancies from different agencies on the time it took to have the system operational and what caused the problems.

Randi Levin, general manager of the Information Technology Agency, said steps have been taken to install dedicated power backup and hire an outside consultant to assess the city’s communication system.

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