NATION AND WORLD
University Daily Kansan, March 2, 1984
Page 9
Power loss baffles West
By United Press International
SAN FRANCISCO - Authorities were mystified yesterday by a seven-state power failure that darkened homes, restaurants and traffic lights Wednesday night for millions of people from the Canadian to the Mexican borders.
Officials said they did not know the cause of the failure and that it may be days before it was learned.
THE OUTAGES Wednesday night ranged from a few seconds in some areas to several hours in others. The blackout hit a wide area of California and parts of Nevada, Utah, Montana, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.
Mississippi, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico
No serious injuries or damage were reported
It was business as usual in Nevada gambling casinos, which used emergency generators to keep the tables open during the outage. But two-thirds of the metropolitan Tucson, Ariz., area was blacked out for nearly an hour.
Stores emptied, ovens and TV sets turned off, hospitals used emergency generators, diners ate by candlelight and night school classes in some areas had to be canceled. Traffic jams were widespread.
"I don't know when we'll find out the cause," said Pacific Geo & Electric Co. spokesman Chuck Peterson in San Francisco.
PG&E officials said a 500,000-volt transmission line located about 100 miles south of the Oregon border near Redding, Calif., went down at dusk Wednesday. At about the same time, the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant, near Sacramento, Calif., shut down, along with power in much of Arizona.
Rancho Seco was back on line yesterday.
Amir Seed was back on the yesterday.
ABOUT 750,000 customers in the Los Angeles area were affected by the blackout, power company officials said. About 150,000 were affected in San Diego.
Play at a bowling alley in Vista, Calif., was halted, but no one left. Manager Nick Mancini said, "They all said, 'There no place to go but to a dark home.' They just stayed, talked and relaxed."
and relaxed.
Sixty percent of affluent Marin County, where a number of bedroom suburbs of San Francisco are located, was blacked out.
PG&E said about 3 million of its customers were directly affected. In some areas, lights flickered and power was restored immediately. But in other areas, such as Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, El Paso, parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area, including the Silicon Valley district, were well into submergence from 30 minutes to three hours — well into superstition.
Police and fire officials said there were traffic problems and rescues of people trapped in elevators.
"It's dark all the way to the mountains," said a worker in a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles. "Everything to the sky."
At Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast, the black hit four minutes before the scheduled test of a Minuteman 2 missile. Backup generators went into operation but the launch was delayed more than three hours.
PG&E officials said an "automatic load shedding system" that redistributes and balances power in emergencies in the Western states went into effect almost immediately after the initial breakdown.
That drew power from some areas, shunted too much power away from other areas and "kept the entire system from going down," one said. At the same time, the company started bringing all its other plants up to full capacity.
"We didn't end up with a New York City-type blackout because of the way our system is designed," said one electric company official.
By United Press International
Reagan seeking guidelines
WASHINGTON — President Reagan intends to renew his call for legislation that would permit employers to hire youths between 16 and 22 for less than the current minimum wage of $3.35 an hour, White House officials said yesterday.
The officials said Reagan agreed during a meeting of his Cabinet Council on Economic Affairs to resubmit the proposal for the legislation last year as part of a broader job package.
The legislation favored by Reagan would establish a "youth employment opportunity wage" of $2.50 per hour for workers between the ages of 16 and 22.
The sub-minimum wage is bitterly opposed by organized labor, which contends that employers to cut their operating costs by replacing adult workers with teenagers.
"The president feels that youth unemployment, which is now 20 percent, is great enough that we should try every possible method to get jobs for kids," said White House spokesman Martin Fitzwater. "That is to be the most rational and promising."
House OKs excise taxes for raising $50 billion
By United Press International
WASHINGTON — The House Ways and Means Committee, seeking to cut the huge federal deficit, late yesterday reached tentative agreement on raising $50 billion, including taxes on liquor, cigarettes and telephone calls.
The present 16 cents-a-pack tax on cigarettes is scheduled to drop to 8 cents next year. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, D-III., has proposed freezing the tax at 16 cents to raise $3.8 billion over a little more than two years.
BUT ON AN amendment by Rep. James Martin, R-N.C., the committee agreed to set the tax at 12 cents a pack beginning Oct. 1, 1985, through the end of 1987. To make up the difference, the panel voted to raise liquor taxes by about $3.75 per gallon of 100-proof spirits for the same time period.
The committee worked late into the night to complete the $50 billion bill. Part of it is Rostenkowski's tax freeze package, which includes continuing the 3-percent telephone excise tax until 1988, which will raise $3.2 billion.
The bill also decreases the number of years taxpayers can use for income and expenses.
The committee also has made some
technical changes in, and approved, an $8 billion tax package passed in committee last year.
THE FEDERAL DEBT is approaching 1.5 trillion. President Reagan, in his State of the Union speech, called for a $100 billion down payment on the deficit. His fiscal 1985 budget is $180 billion in the red.
The telephone tax provision, income averaging and several other items overlap with similar measures applied by the Senate Finance Committee.
The Finance Committee agreed yesterday to tax changes worth nearly $9 billion. Committee aides said that brought the committee's total, including item passed last year but still not much more than $6 billion shy of the $100 billion goal.
A move to freeze the tax deduction for charitable contributions by those who do not itemize their returns at the 1983 level — 25 percent of the first $100 contribution — was turned down by the committee.
Sen. Daniel Moynain, D-N.Y., said the small contributions go to groups like "Girl Scouts, the local rest home and the Baptist church."
"If we're looking at the Girl Scouts,
committee Chairman Robert Dole,
E-Kan, retorted. "We better worry
about it. Our goals are going to be
when they grow up."
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