DWP says it is not responsible for the Sunset lane closure during rush hour.
Electrical Work at Palisades Village Explained
By SUE PASCOE
Residents have complained about the traffic caused by lane closures on Sunset and Monument, adjacent to the Palisades Village project. DWP trucks were onsite and residents wondered if this was regarding power for Caruso’s Palisades Village complex.
“No,” is what DWP Community Affairs spokesperson Carol Tucker told Circling the News in an August 23 email. The electrical work will serve the residents north of Sunset, including the Alphabet streets.
A power line was located in the alley that was behind the Mobil station and Pearl Dragon. The line had to be removed in order for the Caruso development to go forward. Developer Rick Caruso is paying for LADWP to convert that circuit to an underground line, according to Tucker.
In July, LADWP crews constructed a temporary overhead circuit with poles and wires along Monument and Swarthmore Avenue, which was necessary so that residents could continue to have power while the original line (going through Village property) was removed.
At the beginning of August, crews installed new infrastructure for the new underground line (going under the Village property) that will replace the overhead line that was removed, according to Tucker.
She explained that this type of work, splicing and pulling cable, and is not considered construction work.
“LADWP is not required to have a construction permit for the type of work we are doing on Sundays. The permits you referred to are necessary when excavating in public streets, and that work had been previously completed. The current work being performed on weekends, including Sunday, involves pulling cable and working in a maintenance hole. We have the necessary permit, called ‘Permit to open maintenance hole cover’ under Chapter 6 of the Los Angeles Municipal Code.
“Our permit is valid for one year from January 1, 2018 to December 31, 2018. Under this permit, the work is restricted during ‘rush hour times’ (weekday mornings and afternoons) but not weekends.”
Tucker continued, “Doing this type of work that doesn’t involve excavation or construction is more cost-effective when done on weekends. It doesn’t impact traffic during commuting hours and allows more time during regular weekday hours for our crews to do power reliability work elsewhere that does require construction under restricted hours.”
The electrical crews worked in the underground vault this past weekend and will once again be onsite during Labor Day weekend.
The electrical lines that are being updated are not the ones that feed Caruso’s project; that electricity comes from a separate 4.8 kilovolt circuit, according to Tucker.
She added that “this type of infrastructure work doesn’t address the overloading situation on the existing distributing station (DS 29, on Sunset at Via de la Paz) or affect the need for a new DS station and/or the pole-top distributing stations PTDS.
“This is because that overloading problem is occurring at the substation level. The problem of the overloaded distributing station hasn’t changed and won’t be improved by the overhead-underground conversion project going on now,” Tucker said.”
If DWP is not responsible for lane closures during rush hour, who is?
