The morning along the San Pedro docks began typically enough, summery but cool, as the first shift powered up the Port of Los Angeles. The giant cranes that fill the sky like skeletal bridges hummed to life. Semis already were lined up at the front gates, ready to take on loads of shipping containers as big as mobile homes.

But at a little past 7, an all-too-familiar trouble flared. A blip in the electric power lines so short it barely registered on the monitors of the L.A. Department of Water and Power brought major operations at the busiest seaport in the Western Hemisphere to an abrupt stop.

If the public face of the port is the forest of cranes and mountain range of cargo containers, its invisible heart is a network of computers that controls almost the entire operation. That system, along with a growing multitude of electric-powered equipment and vehicles, depends on an uninterrupted supply of electricity. Rebooting all those smart devices, sometimes requiring workers to climb to the tops of 200-foot cranes, can take several hours, no matter how brief the outage.

By the time everything was back up and running on that August morning, unloading schedules were scrambled, frustrated terminal operators struggled in vain to make up lost time and the freeway was backed up by dozens of semis.

“It’s a significant direct financial impact,” said Jeff Vogel, general counsel to the National Assn. of Waterfront Employers, whose members include container-handling companies. “We operate in a just-in-time economic model where getting that vessel in and out of the port as quickly as possible is critical.”

And the impact of power interruptions goes beyond the immediate costs and frustration. It threatens a commitment to meet major, long-term climate change goals by further electrifying port operations and the huge distribution system it supplies.

The brief surge was one of three already this month and the 12th power-related outage of the year so far. And the recent disruptions hit particularly hard as summer is a busy season for the ports, with back-to-school and Halloween deliveries as well as retailers getting a jump on Christmas shipments. The Port of L.A. had a record July, handling more than 939,000 containers.

“It’s a pretty big deal with the amount of cargo they have to move,” said Thomas Jelenić, a vice president at the Pacific Merchant Shipping Assn., which represents the terminal operators.

It will be an even bigger deal down the road. The port, with the DWP, is aiming to phase out greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade.

To meet this goal, the port will need almost twice as much power as it currently uses by the end of the decade, DWP estimates. But the surges and dips have raised serious concerns about whether the port and its tenants will have reliable energy to meet their needs.

The private companies that operate container-handling terminals long ago electrified the massive ship-to-shore cranes and are now investing millions to transition forklifts, gantry cranes and yard tractors that move and stack containers, as well as other vehicles and equipment that run mostly on diesel.

“We’re up against the zero-emission mandate by 2030, and I don’t know how that happens right now,” said one terminal executive who asked not to be identified. None of the seven container terminals at the Port of L.A. would talk publicly about their grievances, saying they were concerned how municipal authorities who are their landlord and power supplier might react.

Though the Port of L.A. and its Long Beach sister facility are on the leading edge, other seaports around the country also have been moving to electrify their operations. That’s placed more demand on the grid, with occasional brownouts having been reported at some ports in the East and Gulf coasts, said the Waterfront Employers’ Vogel.

But the problem appears to be particularly acute at the Port of Los Angeles, he said.

At the Port of Long Beach, where electricity is supplied by investor-owned Southern California Edison, terminal operators say power interruptions haven’t been an issue. In fact, Sean Gamette, the port’s managing director of engineering, couldn’t recall a single outage this year.

It’s helped that Southern California Edison’s lines are mostly underground and that the port, deemed a vital infrastructure, is exempt from brownouts, an outage resulting from a temporary drop in voltage. In the mid-2000s some $180 million was invested to upgrade the electric infrastructure at the port, said Gamette.

Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, was careful not to overstate, or minimize, the disruptions and the threat to the operations. Power surges tend to affect only some of the terminals, he said, and typically everything is rebooted in a couple of hours. If you have on average one brief outage a month, that might add up to one lost shift out of 36, Seroka said.

“I don’t think it’s shutting down this port. It is not terribly impacting competitiveness.” But he added: “If I’m a terminal operator and I’ve got to pay workers for a shift that they’re not working, that’s very painful. And so we’ve got to fix it.”

The issue isn’t just financial. Outages pose safety risks, too. At one terminal yard, a power surge in mid-July caused a driverless cargo-moving truck to crash into a container. “You can have a crane operator get violently stopped and jostled,” said another terminal manager.

Terminal operators say they think the source of the outages is at the utility, and have wondered whether the DWP has even recorded the momentary outages that cause costly delays on the docks.

DWP officials say it’s not a one-sided issue and, at the request of The Times, furnished a synopsis of the dozen outages this year. The utility said two were due to birds hitting power lines, one was caused by a truck explosion and another because a power transformer went bad.

But according to the account provided to The Times, in five outages, each lasting 10 seconds, no cause was found. Simon Zewdu, a senior manager of the DWP’s power system, said such momentary outages are usually due to an issue on the user’s side.

“Increasingly we’re seeing equipment installed by our customers that are very sensitive to minor voltage fluctuations,” he said.

Zewdu said the DWP is working to expand substations at the Port of L.A. and construct new underground lines as part of a $500-million project to be completed by 2029. These efforts should help both add power and improve reliability.

In addition, Zewdu and the Pacific Merchant Shipping Assn. began a fresh round of meetings this week to discuss strategies to mitigate outages and with an eye to their zero-emission goal. Among other things, Zewdu said he wants to install monitoring equipment on circuits on both the utility and terminal sides to discern the source of the power surges — something he said hadn’t been done yet because the terminal operators had not made a request or given permission to DWP’s power quality-monitoring team.

Jelenić, of the Pacific shipping group, said that until Monday he wasn’t even aware such a monitoring program at the DWP existed.

“Right now we’re deficient in both our near-term and long-term needs,” he said, but added that his group had a very encouraging meeting with DWP officials this week. “They were concerned about issues we’re having, they proposed solutions, and made clear, open lines of communication.”

Fisker Inc. has received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission, indicating the bankrupt Southern California electric vehicle maker could be under investigation by Wall Street’s top cop, according to a court filing.

SEC subpoenas, which typically seek either records or testimony, are confidential, but a mention of the agency’s demand for information was included in a U.S. Bankruptcy Court filing this week in Delaware, where the troubled automaker filed for Chapter 11 protection on June 18 under a heavy debt load. The subpoena was included in a list of ongoing legal proceedings against Fisker; the filing did not provide any details about why the agency issued the subpoena.

As the company’s stock price has plummeted, shareholders have experienced large stock losses. Fisker is a defendant in a pending shareholder class-action lawsuit and five shareholder derivative complaints regarding a sharp drop in its stock price last fall. Derivative suits are filed by shareholders on behalf of the company and typically accuse officers or directors of wrongdoing.

Shaneeda Jaffer, a white-collar defense attorney at Benesch in San Francisco, said that although it’s an “absolute possibility” that Fisker is the target of an investigation, the agency also issues subpoenas to parties that might be able to provide information about other probes.

“Or you could be a subject of an investigation where you haven’t necessarily been put in either of those buckets. Companies and individuals receive subpoenas from the SEC all the time,” she said.

If wrongdoing is found, SEC investigations can lead to civil allegations or referrals to the Department of Justice for potential criminal investigation and possible charges.

A spokesperson for the agency said it does not comment on whether it is conducting an investigation. Fisker also declined to comment.

Fisker, based in Manhattan Beach until it moved to Orange County earlier this year, was founded in 2016 by auto designer Henrik Fisker. It went public in 2020 amid a surge of investor interest in electric vehicles, raising about $1 billion in capital, and was valued at close to $8 billion a year later.

Fisker’s stock reached an all-time high of $31.96 in March 2021 before dropping below $10 the next year and falling off a cliff late last year to under $2 a share. It now trades for less than a penny.

Last year, it released its first model, an SUV called the Ocean that was intended to compete with Tesla’s Model Y. But it had trouble meeting production goals at its contract manufacturer in Austria and delivering the vehicles to customers. The car also was plagued by software glitches. The company was reportedly in talks this year with Nissan to build a pickup truck domestically but failed to reach an agreement.

The lawsuits similarly allege that Henrik Fisker, the company’s chairman and chief executive; his wife, Geeta Gupta-Fisker, the company’s co-founder and chief financial and operating officer; and others, including board members, violated their fiduciary duties and/or securities laws. The company declined comment.

The allegations generally stem from a series of events that began with a news release issued in August 2023 that stated Fisker would produce up to 23,000 Oceans that year. However, it disclosed in November that in the third quarter it had built only 4,725 of the vehicles, with 1,097 delivered to customers.

The company also announced in November that its third-quarter results would be delayed due to the departure of its chief accounting officer, whose replacement resigned within days. When it released the results, Fisker said it had to make “material adjustments” to its financials and had identified a “material weakness in internal controls.” The company’s share price fell that month by more than half, to less than $2.

James Lucas, 52, a Fisker shareholder who said he lost more than $100,000 investing in the company, said shareholders also are angry over a series of media appearances by Henrik Fisker during which he touted the company’s prospects, even as its fortunes declined.

“There were a lot of comments made by mostly Henrik Fisker that had these kind of broad visions about the number of vehicles that were going to be produced. Whether it was just a failure to execute, who knows,” said the L.A. County resident. “As an investor you take senior managers’ word on a lot of things.”

Lucas, who participates in a Telegram group of Fisker investors, said he has filed complaints with the SEC against Fisker citing multiple issues and believes other aggrieved investors also have done so.

In March 2023, before the company had released the Ocean, Fisker boasted on CNBC that the automaker would make money on the first cars it shipped because its vehicle was being built by its contract manufacturer. “I can just sit counting the cash,” he said during the interview, which included a projection that Fisker would sell 1 million cars in 2027.

One year later on March 1, Fisker told an interviewer on Bloomberg TV that the company would “conservatively” deliver 20,000 to 22,000 to a new dealer network it had decided to put together. “In fact, we have a few dealers telling us, are you sure you can deliver us enough cars because we think we can sell more cars than what you’re offering us right now,” he said.

That same day, he told Yahoo Finance that he was confident the share price would rise above $1 a share to avoid being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. “I feel very optimistic about our future,” he said. The shares were delisted the next month.

Fisker produced only somewhat more than 10,000 vehicles before it filed for bankruptcy.

With the stock now trading for less than a penny in bankruptcy, Henrik Fisker has suffered big losses too, with his stake in the company worth little to nothing. But he also sold about $20 million worth of stock in 2021 well before the steep decline.

The company said that Henrik Fisker was not speaking to the media.

Andrew Fiorella, a securities litigator in Cleveland also at Benesch, said it was highly unlikely Fisker shareholders would be able to recover their losses, given that secured debt holders and others with claims against the bankrupt company have priority over common shareholders.

“There’s almost certainly going to be nothing left at the end of the day,” he said.

Fisker is not the only California startup electric vehicle maker that has experienced troubles amid a sales slowdown that is at least partially attributable to a rise in interest rates that has made financing more costly.

Rivian in Irvine and Lucid in the Bay Area, which both went public in 2021, also have seen sharp price declines as the hype over EVs has faded. However, each company has deep-pocketed institutional investors, and both are still operating.

The company whose data breach potentially exposed every American’s Social Security number to identity thieves finally has acknowledged the data theft — and said hackers obtained even more sensitive information than previously reported.

National Public Data, a Florida-based company that collects personal information for background checks, posted a “Security Incident” notice on its site to report “potential leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024.” The company said the breach appeared to involve a third party “that was trying to hack into data in late December 2023.”

According to a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the hacking group USDoD claimed in April to have stolen personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data. Posting in a forum popular among hackers, the group offered to sell the data, which included records from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, for $3.5 million, a cybersecurity expert said in a post on X.

Last week, a purported member of USDoD identified only as Felice told the hacking forum that they were offering “the full NPD database,” according to a screenshot taken by BleepingComputer. The information consists of about 2.7 billion records, each of which includes a person’s full name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and phone number, along with alternate names and birth dates, Felice claimed.

None of the information was encrypted.

Such a release would be problematic enough. But according to National Public Data, the breach also included email addresses — a crucial piece for identity thieves and fraudsters.

Having a person’s email address makes it easier to target them with phishing attacks, which try to dupe people into revealing passwords to financial accounts or downloading malware that can extract sensitive personal information from your devices. In addition, because many people use their email address to log into online accounts, it could be used to try to hijack those accounts through password resets.

It’s not clear what, exactly, has been leaked on the dark web from the breach. In a very small sampling of scans using Google One, email addresses taken during the National Public Data breach did not appear. But a free tool from the cybersecurity company Pentester found that other personal data purportedly exposed by the breach, including Social Security numbers, were on the dark web.

National Public Data said on its website that it will notify individuals if there are “further significant developments” applicable to them. “We have also implemented additional security measures in efforts to prevent the reoccurrence of such a breach and to protect our systems,” it said.

Previously, in an email sent to people who’d sought information about their accounts, the company said that it had “purged the entire database, as a whole, of any and all entries, essentially opting everyone out.” As a result, it said, it has deleted any “non-public personal information” about people, although it added, “We may be required to retain certain records to comply with legal obligations.”

The company did not respond to a request for comment. Under a number of state laws, including California’s, companies must notify any individual whose personal information is reasonably believed to have been taken by an unauthorized person.

At this point, it appears that the only notice provided by National Public Data is the page on its website, which states, “We are notifying you so that you can take action which will assist to minimize or eliminate potential harm. We strongly advise you to take preventive measures to help prevent and detect any misuse of your information.”

The steps recommended by National Public Data include checking your financial accounts for unauthorized activity and placing a free fraud alert on your accounts at the three major credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Once you’ve placed a fraud alert on your account, the company advised, ask for a free credit report, then check it for accounts and inquiries that you don’t recognize. “These can be signs of identity theft.”

Security experts also advise putting a freeze on your credit files at the three major credit bureaus. You can do so for free, and it will prevent criminals from taking out loans, signing up for credit cards and opening financial accounts under your name. The catch is that you’ll need to remember to lift the freeze temporarily if you are obtaining or applying for something that requires a credit check.

In the meantime, security experts say, make sure all of your online accounts use two-factor authorization to make them harder to hijack.

It’s also important to look for signs that an email or text is not legitimate, given the spread of “imposter scams.” Using messages disguised to look like an urgent inquiry from your bank or service provider, these scams try to dupe you into giving up keys to your identity and, potentially, your savings. Any request for sensitive personal information is a giant red flag.

Aleksandr Valentij of cybersecurity company Surfshark suggested checking the sender’s email address carefully to see if it doesn’t precisely match the name of the organization they purportedly represent, and looking for typos or grammatical errors — two telltale signs of a scam. And if the message is from someone you’ve never interacted with before, Valentij said, avoid clicking on links, including an “unsubscribe” link or button, because bad actors will use them for malicious purposes.

“If you suspect that you’ve received a phishing email, don’t interact with it and report it to your email provider,” Valentij said. “If it’s someone pretending to be a legitimate organization, you should also report it to that organization. Once that’s done, delete the email and stay vigilant for similar emails in the future.”