The Latest: Power restored to USC medical campus

LOS ANGELES – The Latest on a power outage at the USC Health Sciences campus in Los Angeles (all times local):

5:20 p.m.

Power has been restored to a USC medical campus east of downtown Los Angeles where electricity was knocked out by an equipment failure in an underground vault.

USC Health Sciences says a large swath of its campus, including the Keck Medical Center, was affected by the failure of a vault switch Thursday morning.

There were no injuries.

Backup generators took over, but two employees had to be rescued from elevators and elective surgeries were cancelled.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power announced Thursday evening that crews have restored electrical service to the hospital campus and are working to restore power to two nearby commercial buildings.

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12:10 p.m.

A USC Health Sciences official says a large swath of its campus east of downtown Los Angeles was hit by a power outage but backup generators are working and patients are not being affected.

Dr. Stephanie Hall says two employees were rescued from two elevators after the Thursday morning outage involving a municipal utility vault off campus that also affected adjacent parts of the city.

Hall says elective surgeries have been cancelled and no patients are being transferred in but treatment of emergency cases continues.

Hall is the chief medical officer of Keck USC Hospital and USC Norris Cancer Hospital, which are among facilities on the 79-acre campus adjacent to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.

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Firefighters had to be summoned to free people stuck in elevators on the USC Health Sciences campus adjacent to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center following a widespread power failure.

Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Margaret Stewart says multiple transformers blew Thursday morning, affecting multiple buildings on the sprawling campus east of downtown.

Stewart says the number of people involved wasn’t immediately known but there have been no injuries.