A BURNT-OUT TRANSFORMER at the Los Angeles County Office of Education caused a two-day interruption in Internet and email service to about 2,500 Los Angeles and Orange County Learning Community Network (LALCNet/OCLCNet) customers and other County electronic services.

The transformer, housed at LACOE’s Downey headquarters burnt out at about 11 a.m. September 29 causing not only a service interruption to the Internet and LALCNet email system, but also to several county school’s payroll and accounting systems, said Art Lozano, senior network engineer for LACOE.

Network members, who must dial into one of several locations to connect to the Internet and to receive email, were unable to do so because the main Internet and email servers which are housed at LACOE were effected by the power outage.

"Southern California Edison had trouble finding parts because it was an old transformer, so it took longer than expected to get running again," Lozano said. "Over the course of those couple of days we had a lot of power surges so we had to take our time in turning it back on."

Normal power levels were finally restored at about 3 a.m. Thursday morning with full email service and Internet access becoming functional later that morning.