Oct. 12--A third major power outage in less than a month struck the downtown Los Angeles area Tuesday, prompting renewed calls for an explanation from Department of Water and Power officials.

The outage occurred at 9:34 a.m. and affected the Civic Center area -- including City Hall and police headquarters at Parker Center. Emergency generators restored power to some areas, although many offices remained dark throughout the day.

DWP officials said they were trying to determine what caused the outage and said the delay in restoring power was because individual circuits had to be checked to determine the location of the problem.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said he wanted a report from the utility on the number of outages.

"The mayor is very concerned with the frequency and wants to know what is going on with the system," spokesman Joe Ramallo said.

Councilman Tony Cardenas, who chairs the City Council's Commerce, Energy and Natural Resources Committee -- which oversees the DWP -- questioned whether the most recent outage reflected a broader problem with the city's power system.

"I want to know if this is just a rash of bad timing or if we have a systemwide problem we need to look at," Cardenas said.

On Sept. 12, power to half of the city was lost for more than an hour when live wires were cut by workers at the Toluca Lake station. Two weeks later, there was another brief outage affecting the Burbank area when crews dug up power lines.

For the Los Angeles City Council, Tuesday's blackout meant a return to the old ways -- with no computers, vote machines or microphones.

The council's audio crew developed an emergency system using wireless microphones hooked up to battery-powered speakers. All council votes were tabulated by hand and records were kept on paper rather than electronically.

It also meant the council's broadcast over Channel 35 was not live, with crews from the city station taping the meeting for later broadcast.

"If this is just a series of coincidences and bad luck, that's one thing," Cardenas said. "But, we need to look to see if there is a more serious problem we should be addressing."