Nearly 9,000 residents in the San Fernando Valley were left without electricity Wednesday after a transformer explosion and fire at a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power substation in Studio City. The outage occurred around 9 p.m. in the 4200 block of Coldwater Canyon, where firefighters were extinguishing a blaze linked to the explosion.
The incident caused outages across Studio City and Sherman Oaks and left drivers ensnared in multiple car crashes in the area.
“We don’t know what happened yet,” said Vonda Paige of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “When the alarm went off it triggered an automatic power cutoff to those areas.”
LADWP officials announced the closure of the northbound lanes of Coldwater Canyon until further notice early Thursday morning, as crews worked to restore power in the area.
Read more about the outage here.