5 Water Main Breaks in a Week

By Jason Burns
September 11th, 2009 @ 2:11 PM Utilities

sinkDid you know that another water main broke today in Los Angeles? That makes five.

UPDATE (2:46PM) Make that six. In less than a week.

But, don’t worry. The City Council plans to “more closely monitor upgrades to the city’s aging, leaky water system.”

Oh. Thanks.

In the meantime, may I recommend some afternoon shopping?

Photo from KTLA

Related posts:

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  3. Reduce Your Water Use By June 1st or Pay Higher Rates to LA DWP
  4. Water rationing on tap – 3 more things Los Angeles should ration
  5. Second Annual ID Film Festival this week in Little Tokyo

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2 Comments so far

  1. Laure (unregistered) on September 12th, 2009 @ 12:03 pm

    Wait until we get the big EQ…
    Also: http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2009/09/la_sketchbook_drip.php


  2. lamapnerd on September 14th, 2009 @ 5:37 pm

    “That makes five six”?

    Since when? Since you started paying attention?

    LADWP says it averages 1400 supply-main leaks and breaks a year, about 200 of which are large enough to garner media attention. That’s an average of about three to four breaks a day, with about four a week being newsworthy.

    Only one of the five reported breaks that’ve made the news since the Franklin Canyon trunkline rupture on Coldwater was really big enough to warrant much media attention – and that mostly because some poor fireman accidentally drove his truck into the resulting sinkhole.

    So, really, this is pretty much normal. Business as usual. The only thing that’s unusual is that, suddenly, since the big trunkline rupture, every blogger in town gets excited every time a pipe breaks somewhere.

    Water supply mains are generally expected to last about 60-100 years. An awful lot of LA’s water-supply system is just now reaching that age – the LA aqueduct, which triggered the massive expansion of the city of LA’s territory, as everybody and his brother annexed themselves to LA to share in the aqueduct water, was completed almost a hundred years ago.

    The Franklin Canyon trunkline was a riveted iron pipe installed in 1914 to connect the reservoir at the aqueduct’s terminus in Sylmar to the city supply reservoir in Franklin Canyon. It was already scheduled for replacement, but the replacement crews hadn’t quite gotten to that section yet.

    And sixty years takes us back to the post-WWII expansion that was the biggest construction boom in LA’s history.

    This is really a non-story. Routine maintenance in a city the size of LA.



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