Sometimes the joints rust.
Sometimes the increased pressure compresses the arteries.
Sometimes there is a little leakage.
It’s hard to get old.
But that’s true of the vast network of underground pipes that deliver more than 400 million gallons of water every day to customers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
We don’t think much until it is a major waterway breakas it was on the morning of July 17 under Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. A 36-inch artery blew out like a ruptured aorta, creating a sinkhole and sending 17 million gallons of water rushing into the streets.
As repairs neared completion at the major water break that flooded West Hollywood last week, another leak occurred on July 23 near Santa Monica Boulevard and Laurel Avenue.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
We found out from the DWP in the initial post-mortem that the pipe in question had been in operation for over a century – 110 years, if that.
As someone who writes regularly about aging, I’ve been thinking about this. We think of Los Angeles as a small city, but out of sight and beneath our feet is a large community of unappreciated adults whose work is essential to our survival.
Through droughts and earthquakes, and from horse-drawn carriages to driverless cars, they have delivered.
President Woodrow Wilson was re-elected the year the pipeline was laid, and the Germans attacked the French in World War I at Verdun, the death toll was over 700,000.
Every time since then, water has flowed in that channel under the many incarnations of the Sunset Strip, feeding small pipes that extinguished a metropolis that grew from about 500,000 people to four million.
Last month, I went with friends from Book Soup one evening to get a drink at Dialog. If we had done that on July 17, we might have drifted all the way to the sea.
Tadeh Ghazalian, the owner of Dialog, was still assessing the damage in his restaurant the other day. He slipped on the stairs to the back stairs and the water damaged tiles scattered like sour salt.
Water, essential to life, can destroy everything in its path.
“This is a disaster,” Ghazalian said, telling me he didn’t know when he would be able to get workers back to work and serve customers again.
An aerial view of Metro’s flooded bus yard, where water gushed after a more than 100-year-old trunk line failed on Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
LADWP has approximately 6,800 miles of pipes between 4 inches and 20 inches in diameter, and another 570 miles of larger mains. Many of them work until the day they die, and a funeral is the opposite of what we do as humans. We pull the dead soldiers out of the ground and mount them.
The DWP tells us that 30% of its main underground lines are 80 years old or older. By comparison, about 3.7% of LA County’s population is 80 or older.
You may remember that back in 2014, when UCLA was an underwater university for a while, it was another geezer that blew a gasket. That pipe was 90, and it died spectacularly, sending a 30-foot geyser and causing damage to millions.
But just like people do, older pipes can withstand problems and perform better than younger ones.
“Age is not the only thing,” Anselmo Collins, DWP’s water systems manager, told me.
USC engineering professor Lucio Soibelman took that thought.
“You can look at a 100-year-old pipe,” he said, “and the pipe is in pretty good shape.”
Factors that destroy the structural integrity of pipelines include soil compaction and water table fluctuations, Soibelman said.
As someone who has measured the work of the DWP time and time again, my sense of doing the job of measuring the water line split (a few leaks have exploded since the most recent one) is to look for the possibility of failed leadership.
This is an institution with a history of debt scandals, union bosses abusing pupuver pols, stiff pensions and poor health and dental plans that require little or no pay from workers. Then there is the annual plowing of millions upon millions of additional DWP dollars into the City Hall piggy bank, ensuring taxpayers are being ripped off.
So has the agency ignored the foundation of the geriatric underground?
In fact, the DWP replaces about 45 miles of deteriorating water mains a year, with new pipes designed to last 150 years.
“They should have started this about 40 or 50 years ago,” said Loyola Marymount University engineering professor Joseph Reichenberger.
Soibelman backed away from that.
“They are doing very well,” said the professor, who spoke to me by phone from an infrastructure conference in Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Philadelphia and Boston, the oldest cities, have more water disruptions than LA, Soibelman said. And the DWP is well below the national average for leaking pipes, he says, thanks to better monitoring and management techniques.
Out of curiosity, I did a little research in Cambridge and found out that the Franciscan friars laid the first water pipes in 1325, and the modern water system entered the ground in 1855. Local service is average a five-year project replacing 150 miles of pipes, the oldest being 170.
I Cambridge water company “incident” website He says there have been four water breaks since early June, including one on Thursday afternoon at Boxworth Road and Cotterells Lane. The use of garden hoses is temporarily prohibited due to the drought.
So it could be worse here in LA
Collins told me that the 45 miles of new pipe installed each year is about three times the number twenty years ago. Raising the speed limit is a worthy goal, he said, but that would mean overstaffing, disrupting traffic and commerce by closing more roads, and asking customers to write bigger checks.
“There’s a scaling effect when you do more,” says Collins.
This is a common theme in Los Angeles.
Pipes. Sidewalks. Trees.
Aging is expensive. And if you let things go, the price rises to the point where you can’t afford the surgery.
It would take years and millions to fix all the broken streets in Los Angeles. European cities have done a better job, Soibelman says, but that’s because they’re not built for mobility, while LA is built for four-wheeled luxury.
In 1916, when the 36-inch pipe was dropped along Sunset Boulevard, automobiles were just beginning to compete with Los Angeles’ horse-drawn carriages and wagons.
There was no Dodger. The team, known as the Brooklyn Robins, was 3,000 miles and 42 years away from Los Angeles.
Philippe Woqobo was in business, but Musso and Frank Grill were three years away from mixing their first martini.
Born in 1916, and now long gone, were Walter Cronkite, Gregory Peck, Dinah Shore, Jackie Gleason and Kirk Douglas.
It’s hard to get old.
I know a few older people, who are doing very well.
During a break, Bullwinkle managed to pull a rabbit out of her hat and save herself and Rocky when everything around them was swept away on July 17 in West Hollywood.
The cartoon characters, now 67 years old (see above, the original episode was from 1959), stood firm at Sunset and Holloway, with Rocky the squirrel and Bullwinkle the moose guarding the Big Fix as if they were bosses on the DWP payroll.
It’s good to see them working again, and it’s good to know they have good health care plans.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
