Above Photo of UCLA water main break by Jay L. Clendenin/The Los Angeles Times
Volume 2 - Issue 15 | December 2022
Waste Not, Want Not
by Allison Weber
“There it is — take it”
Those were the infamous words William Mulholland spoke before a crowd of 40,000 Angelenos when he gave the signal to let water brought from almost 300 miles away across the Mojave Desert, flow down the Sylmar Cascades. With extreme insensitivity to the inhabitants of the Owens Valley, this same opening of the floodgates is recreated in hallmark years for the LA Aqueduct: e.g., to commemorate the 75th and 100th anniversaries of what to us here does not symbolize progress.
Right Photo from Los Angeles Department of Water and Power archival video of the LA Aqueduct.
When he told this to the inhabitants of Los Angeles at the time, did Mulholland care what they did with the Owens Valley’s water? Did he care about the future of the infrastructure he built, and the legacy he left? Looking at the aqueduct itself, he probably wouldn’t be too chagrined. “It's a long straw from here to Los Angeles,” former Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) water systems manager Marty Adams said in a 2013 Los Angeles Times article on the 100th anniversary of the aqueduct. “For being 100 years old, it's still in pretty good shape.” In 2013, at least 65% of the system's pipes were more than 50 years old, launching a priority for LADWP to upgrade them, continuing Adams’ vision for the future: “It will continue to serve the city for another 100 years and, with maintenance, a lot longer than that.”
Next year that long straw, sucking water and life from the Eastern Sierra, will be 110. While the eye catching, controversial, and conversation- sparking pipe in the water system is the L.A. Aqueduct itself, a serpentine shape connecting the distant communities of Los Angeles and the Eastern Sierra long before roads bringing tourists ever did, our biggest infrastructure concerns should perhaps actually turn to the end of the pipe. While the L.A. Aqueduct ages, so do all the underground pipes that receive and deliver its water all across Los Angeles.
102 Years Later
The pipes beneath Angelenos’ feet became a more prominent conversation in 2015, as just two years after the 100th anniversary of the Aqueduct, California was in a long drought, the same drought that led LADWP to attempt to completely dewater Long Valley rather than apply further conservation. On April 1st, 2015, the Sierra snowpack’s water content measured just 5% of normal, far surpassing the previous record low of 25% of normal, and leading to desperate calls for conservation statewide. What followed was a 25 percent statewide mandatory cutback in water usage, forcing many Californians to put up with brown lawns, short showers, and unwashed cars, and to have to think about the pipes that deliver water to their homes. What they found was less than encouraging: A UCLA report found that water agencies across the Los Angeles region were unable to keep close track of how much their pipes were leaking. At the time, the state did not require reporting on water loss from leaks and breaks.
Left A dead tree sits in dry soil in Long Valley. Photo by "Without Water" director Jonathan Hyla.
Senate Bill 555, passed later in October of that year, required retail water suppliers to submit annual water loss audit reports beginning in October 2017, and to meet certain performance standards regarding water loss by 2020. This was a good start to addressing a much larger problem, the lack of incentive to do anything about this waste.
At least 84 billion gallons of water is lost to known leaks in California- and that is a conservative estimate according to many. This number is expected to be even higher as many leaks will continue to go entirely undetected. After all, it costs utilities money to install detection technology and then costs them more to repair said leaks once they are detected. For many utilities, the amount lost to leaks is not considered financially “worth it” when the cost of water remains so low.
A 2014 break on the UCLA campus wasted 28 million gallons of water, but according to Joe Castruita, the former director of water distribution for LADWP, that was “just a little over 4 percent of [LADWP’s] daily delivery.” He admits that the economic cost of water is low, “a gallon of water is pennies,” he is quoted as saying in a New York Times article on leaks, but “it’s the loss that’s the tragedy.” In a state thirsting desperately for water, every last drop wasted in delivery may not cost much for utilities when it comes to their bottom line, but it costs the future of our communities and ecosystems dearly.
Right Vehicles in a parking structure on the UCLA campus after flooding from the broken water main left them in several feet of water. Photo from Mike Meadows/The Associated Press
By 2015, about one-fifth of Los Angeles’ water pipes had just about reached the end of their useful life, having been installed before 1931, and corroding extensively where they were buried. These oldest pipes were responsible for a large portion of water main leaks, yet replacing them would cost around a billion dollars. According to H. David Nahai, former head of the Department of Water and Power, "We must do something about our infrastructure and we must make the necessary investment. If we don't act now, we'll simply pay more later." Yet making that investment requires officials to increase rates, something we here at Keep Long Valley Green know they are reluctant to do, especially when they feel they can take more water from the Eastern Sierra first.
With officials debating rate increases, pipes continued to deteriorate and then leak, spilling millions of even more gallons of water into the street amid one of the worst droughts in recorded state history. LADWP officials emphasized that the leak rate had been in decline over the last decade, and their leak rate was about half the industry average, yet between 2006 and 2015, work crews had responded to about 13,000 leaks total, about four a day across the city. One leaking pipe in Woodland Hills gushed out more than half a million gallons of water in the year it took LADWP to both detect and then fix it.
Still Under Water
Fixing the decaying infrastructure of leaky pipes that are losing millions of gallons of water during a time of drought and worsening climate due to human activities cannot happen soon enough in our state - to say nothing of Los Angeles.
Currently, the situation is far from resolved: In July 2022, an LADWP water main burst in the Hollywood Hills, resulting in 2 women needing to be rescued from the roof of a car stuck in up to 10 feet of water in the street, with the looming threat of a sinkhole forming from the flooding. The official diagnosis: the pipe was put in 91 years earlier and as a result, was likely just too old. This large burst is not unusual either: The Hollywood Hills area actually dealt with five other water main breaks from September 2021 to the July 2022 incident.
Water loss from leaks is avoidable, and the future of the Eastern Sierra and Los Angeles requires that we avoid it. Every last drop of water which is extracted from the Owens Valley, Long Valley, and the Mono Basin is precious, especially among worsening drought cycles. Water is life, and we here in the Eastern Sierra do not deny Angelenos the water they need. It is not controversial to say water should not spout into the streets, marooning cars and causing sinkholes, but LADWP would rather dewater Long Valley, pump more groundwater in the Owens Valley, and ignore the worsening situation at Mono Lake before they do what is right for Angelenos and Eastern Sierra residents alike: fixing their pipes and making this waste of water a thing of the past.
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December Wrap-up:
Giving Tuesday Thank You
We hosted our first Giving Tuesday campaign this year and managed to raise over $1,000 from folks like you who care about this special place. The week of Giving Tuesday 2022 we raised $1,035.55 total, with donations ranging from $5 to $250 from 13 different generous community members.
If you are able to and have yet to give this year, there is still more time- we are always accepting donations on our website.
What's Giving Tuesday?
#GivingTuesday is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving & Native American Heritage Day every year. It is a worldwide day of global generosity aimed at mobilizing people and organizations to transform their communities.
Seen Keep Long Valley Green stickers out in public? Got stickers of your own to show off? Share pictures of your stickers with us at info@keeplongvalleygreen.org or by tagging us @keeplongvalleygreen on Instagram/Facebook or @longvalleygreen on Twitter. Happy stickering!
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Without Water is Now Streaming Online!
Without Water has finished its film festival circuit- you can now watch our film, Without Water, for FREE, online, anytime!
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Credits:
Allison Weber photo credits unless otherwise stated