The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was urging customers Thursday to treat utility workers with respect after two employees were threatened verbally and with a firearm while performing official duties at a Westside residence.<\/p>\n
According to LADWP, the employees were attempting to perform a scheduled water shutoff when the incident occurred. The workers, who were unharmed, moved to a safe location and contacted LADWP Security and the Los Angeles Police Department.<\/p>\n
LADWP officials said field crews regularly need access to private property to inspect utility equipment, read meters, perform maintenance and initiate or discontinue service.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a growing problem, and we want to communicate the importance of employee safety and treating our field employees and crews respectfully,\u201d LADWP Director of Advanced Technologies Infrastructure Kevin Mount said in a statement. \u201cIt\u2019s part of our regular course of business to access our equipment on private property.\u201d<\/p>\n
The utility noted that water and electric meters are the property of LADWP and the department retains the legal right to access, inspect, maintain or replace them when necessary.<\/p>\n
Officials urged customers not to threaten or interfere with workers performing their duties and reminded residents they may ask employees for official identification or call LADWP to verify a visit if they have concerns about scammers or impostors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was urging customers Thursday to treat utility workers with respect…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[7310,45940,48,52,51,29545,47,50,49,51333,112564],"class_list":["post-326389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-calls","tag-employees","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-ladwp","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-respect","tag-threatened"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}