Engineers in Los Angeles are baffled by the recent epidemic of failing underground water pipes throughout Los Angeles. Every time you turn on the local TV news around here, over the last few months -- there's new footage of a "major blowout." After examining "dozens of ruptures, some of which flooded streets, damaged vehicles and buildings and created a sinkhole so big that it almost swallowed a firetruck," officials and city engineers have agreed that something odd is going on, but they don't know exactly what, or why so many points of failure in such a compact window of time. Snip from Los Angeles Times:
One note on which most agree: a bankrupt state and a city crippled by slashed budgets are ill-equipped to solve the problem.Los Angeles' water system was put in place by William Mulholland, who figured out how to tap water from the Eastern Sierra and the Owens Valley and designed an aqueduct system that let it flow to Los Angeles on the force of gravity alone. The influx allowed semi-arid Los Angeles to boom -- and subdivisions marched outward in the 1920s and the years just after World War II.
The system remains a marvel to many engineers and still sends water over the Santa Monica Mountains from Sylmar to San Pedro using gravity. But parts of it are now almost 100 years old, and many of the pipes are wearing out.
Here's one LA Times story, and here's another from this morning after two more pipes burst. (Image: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
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The same thing was happening for some time here near Harrisburg, PA in Camp Hill. The water company claimed it had nothing to do with their pressure increases, but in the end, the borough took them to court and now the water company has to pay for any breakages that occur within 48 hours or something after they increase water pressure (I think they're doing it in like, 5 psi increments). I thought it was hilarious that every single time they raised the pressure, a new pipe broke, and yet they denied that the pressure increase had anything to do with it.
All those doughnut shops and dish washing machines? Consider the build-up of food oils and greases as a probable culprit for sewage line failures. LA could do a lot more for biodiesel with those waste lipids.
It's kinda obvious. Why something isn't done about the Graboid infestation, I'll never know.
They should import some CHUD's from New York to deal with that Graboid problem.
Duh. LA has a supervillain on the loose. A lame one,yes, but a supervillain indeed.
It's giant water lice. They run about five feet across, eight feet long, and never less than three feet across. That's why it's only the big mains that are failing.
It's also the real reason why you don't want to go to the beach at night, where the storm drains let out. The story about gang activity is a cover.
It could also be the grubs trying to dig up from nexus.
Noah Cross: Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water.
Call the Fantastic Four, the Mole Man is on the loose again! Clearly, It's Clobberin' Time!
Earthquake precursor? Not the craziest idea in the world.
Tim's Anorak
It's called opportunity cost. That which you spend your money on means you don't get to spend money on something else.
or put another way: piss your money down the drain on pointless wars and surveilling your citizens and your streets will soon start to collapse for lack of maintenance.
I don't know how interconnected the pipe system is and LA is massive, but this all started at around the time of the fires, right?
Is it possible that all the water used to fight the fires somehow threw off the equilibrium?
I blame the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I'm going to guess old pipes and a city built on sand.
High fructose corn syrup making us all fat was not accounted for by Mr. Mulholland or the street department.
These incidents are clearly caused by the subterranean race of shape-shifting lizard people. Come one people, Occam's razor.
"William Mulholland, who figured out how to tap water from the Eastern Sierra and the Owens Valley"
That's like saying Bernie Madoff figured out how to tap money from people.
This pipe bursts seem to have been occurring ever since the water preservation measurements were put in place (no sprinkling the garden except for certain times etc.). Could the drop in water demand cause enough pressure to build up in those pipes? Anyway, it seems that whatever has been saved has been lost during bursts like these.
The dwarves are building a new resort.
It's also quite possible that the entire network of pipes is near its end-of-life (how many were put in in Mulhulland's time?), and simply fixing one triggers the next weak section to fail elsewhere. This is a common problem with vintage electronics so it wouldn't surprise me to see the same with vintage plumbing, especially after many decades of deferred infrastructure maintenance.
btw, Mulholland made a great speech the day the water was pumped over the last mountain range into the San Fernando Valley: "There it is; take it."
There's a concept over here in Europe, that fixed the problem for us. It's called: paying taxes.
(Without throwing a fit or tea-bagging ...)
I wonder if the same company manufactured the water pipes in DC. This keeps happening here too:
http://www.wusa9.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=90325
Or drop in water table, contraction of dried out earth causing stress on pipes.
@22:
There's a concept over in Europe of getting other people to fight your battles for you - and fighting them can get expensive.
Californians do pay taxes, and pay and pay. However, they get in return under-performing schools. They pay more per child for education than any country in Europe outside of Switzerland and Austria. Yet what do we get?
We pay 10B, and growing, per year to maintain a prison system among the worst in this nation.
No, we pay, the problem is one of corruption and allocation, not paying.
And Europe, would not even be Europe today without the United States. Go check your history and leave your condescension on the other side of the pond.
I'm curious what the estimated life span of the system was when it was designed. Infrastructure built 50 years ago or more is beginning to fall apart around the country. There may be something unique to LA's environment, but the root cause is probably just wear and tear. This is what you get when you put off major infrastructure overhauls.
@Anonymous #26
Mostly infrastructure rot. We had some major rip and replace on the sewer system in our local city. Between corroded concrete pipe that basically fell apart being lifted out of the trenches and this weird fiberboard sewage pipe that was installed WWII and post war era because of cost and availability issues, most of the ground water in the north of town probably was of sewage origin.
It's a funny thing how everyone cheers on growth and progress, but don't realize that it all has to be done over again 50-75 years later for infrastructure to remain viable and therefore don't plan or save to replace when repairs no longer restore function.
@Anonymous #25
Gee, what's the cliche? Citation needed? You whiff on everything except the prison situation.
@28: Citation for you. . .
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_spe_per_sec_sch_stu-spending-per-secondary-school-student
Kind of reminds me of all those mysterious behaviors of water courses before the eruption of Vesuvius in 1944.
There a few good documentaries on aging infrastructure in America, a possible explanation.
@25
"They pay more per child for education than any country in Europe outside of Switzerland and Austria."
I saw your source, and that's for secondary education only (a definition that varies by country), and it's by country. California is the wealthiest state in the U.S. and spends below the national average per pupil for K-12 education.
California needs to raise taxes, especially on the rich and super rich. The Republican minority in the state legislature is holding the entire populace hostage to protect the wealthy.
Learn to take a little criticism from across the pond. They've got some ideas we can learn from.
Oh, and if you look at the "$ per GDP" tab, we rank #21.
For crying out loud. There is no big mystery here. As the article points out, the system was installed in the 1920s. Like most municipal water systems I've read about, I assume that the main components were specced out as having a 50 year projected lifespan. It's 80+ years later, and as with almost everything in America, nobody even thought about the fact that all these components would probably wear out at the same time until they did.
Every voter in America seriously needs to read Stephen Flynn's The Edge of Disaster, which is a book-length catalog of critical infrastructure systems, any one of which failing could wreck the economy, in the same situation.
This happened in Manchester (in the UK) in the 1990s. The water system was built in the 1870s with a 150 year design life, but all the water mains began failing at more or less the same time around 120 years in. They were cast iron, and the increased vibration from road traffic was fracturing the (brittle) metal.
The solution -- after the water authority started thinking strategically -- was not to dig them all up and replace them, but to drain the mains, feed plastic liner sleeves down each of them, and heat-bond them to the inner wall of the metal pipes. The plastic is more flexible and can cope with higher pressures, so net win all round. The downside: about five years of planned excavations and road works.
Forget it, Xeni, it's Chinatown.
@25
"the problem is one of corruption and allocation, not paying"
Corruption, at least, isn't really the problem and as for allocation, California voters really have only themselves to blame. The legacy of 1978's Proposition 13 have basically put a lock on raising new taxes, while successive voter initiatives 'allocate' spending for things the state government can't afford to pay for.
If you ask people to individually vote separately on things that will cost them money and things that they will get as additional services, you could rationally predict that people would vote no to taxes and yes to new services. Free stuff!
Governments should be elected to lead and make the hard choices of prioritizing and finding ways to pay for the priorities they choose. Micro-rule by referendum doesn't work.
I work for a water company. There is no one cause of these breaks. Some of them, such as the one in DC recently, were due to poor installation (the pipe seems to have been laid against a large rock instead of a bed of gravel).
Another problem: the pipe itself. Pre-stressed concrete pipe (PCCP) is not aging as well as the designers must have thought. We're seeing PCCP failures among many water utilities across the country.
Yet another problem: Our grand parents and great-grandparents did their very best to plan for the future, but they probably never conceived of the cities as they exist today. Water use per capita has gone up, populations are up, and so the pipes are running much closer to their maximum capacity than anyone ever thought.
Add to that the effort fill water tanks aggressively when energy is cheaper (night time) and it's not hard to imagine that velocities in these pipes are getting precariously fast.
I recently worked on a pumping station where the pipe was relatively small given the flows we were pushing out of the station. I had to program the industrial computers so that they would slowly open and close the discharge valves in such as way so as to NEVER allow a sudden change in water flow velocity. Thrust blocks were installed at several places where the pipes made turns, and yet I still won't be surprised if some day we tear a massive hole in the street when the pipe breaks.
The real solution is to tear out these pipes and to install bigger ones. But nobody is willing to pay for that or put up with the inconvenience. This VERY big money. The president's recent infrastructure investment for water is a sad joke among us. It's inadequate by at least an order of magnitude. Even if it weren't, however, the industrial resources we'd need aren't even there. Those have to be built too.
This is a much larger problem than most people are willing to consider, so we just put up with the pipe breaks and shrug. Some day, a city will be without water for days because of something like this. After the mayhem is over, maybe then people will demand better from their political leadership.
A few people commenting are getting somewhat close to the cause of the breakages. Given the age of the system, it's most likely cast iron pipes that are failing. If that's the case then congratulations, LA, your water supply pipes have exceeded their design life by 50 years. That's pretty remarkable.
The bigger problem, as AB3A states, is lack of funding for water main renuals specifically, but infrastructure maintenance more broadly. It's expensive. Also, there's not a lot of emphasis placed on fixing things that don't appear to be broken among the average taxpayer or politico. Out of sight, out of mind - until your car gets swallowed by a water main break caused sink hole.
When I chose to become a Civil Engineer, I knew that it was a pretty unappreciated branch of engineering. Most people claim they know everything there is to know about CE with the ignorant trotting out of "shit runs downhill". The truth is, it's the only profession in this country with built-in job security as infrastructure has a finite life span (and the number of engineers at or near retirement age vastly outnumber the gen-X and Y replacements).
Bottom line - if you want that clean water to keep coming to your house and your stinky poop to leave your house, you will continue to pay me to do my job.
AB3A:
Looking at the US from the outside, having heard (in Europe!) experts on TV years before Katrina that New Orleans was doomed unless proper levees were erected, having seen the reaction to that disaster and knowing that to this day the city is a vulnerable as it ever was ...
Well, I'll keep saying it. Pay your taxes to the government and say that you *trust* it to do its job. Because only then will politicians see that good management is a better way to be reelected than corruption ...
Btw. the government is always a force *by* the people *for* the people. Once people stop to trust each other, the government, too, will fail.
@ AB3A:
You need REALLY big hammer arrestors!
The notion of governments not investing back into infrastructure is regrettable, but not beyond understanding. People only think in 4 yr increments, and added to that is the notion of "out of sight, out of mind".
The real issue is not who to blame, but how to fix it and make those fixes last 3 or 4 times longer.
-D
@Anon #41: I can think of many things we could have done differently with that pumping station; however, we were left with some horrible constraints that nobody felt like contesting. So it happened.
@TP1024 #40: I don't know much about European infrastructure, but I do know this: A large portion of it came about because of Post WW II reconstruction. Not much of it survived the two world wars. However, cities in the US are different. We have a surprising amount of old infrastructure still in daily use. It wasn't that long ago that we were still pulling 100 year old old wooden pipes out of the ground in nearly pristine condition (we were replacing it because it was undersized). It's not just a matter of tax money, it's a matter of the age of the infrastructure, land use policies, and technologies.
If a European style tax would fix this problem I'd be all over it. However, the problem is much bigger than just money.
@37:
Allocation is certainly the problem. California spends nearly 60B of its 100B budget for education. Nearly 24B of that is for administration and does not make it to the class-room.
Do you have any idea how much infrastructure improvement we could get by reallocating 10B per year?
Prop. 13 is not a problem. Clueless state legislators are the problem.
California has about 200B worth of infrastructure projects to pursue and definitely has the money to do it if they have the courage to reallocate from administrators/prison guard unions toward engineers.
The stuff is just old. simple as that. All the major projects were done during the great depression, which makes sense. Lots of unemployed people get put to work on infrastructure. Obama's trying to do this today. His opponents (guess who) complain that the bill is too costly although it probably ain't enough. When the fat cats stuff falls apart, it'll be a national emergency. So wait. As for me, I live in the woods. I got well and septic tank so I don't care.
I bet the majority of the drug offenders we're keeping in prison are able bodied men who probably had too much idle time before they were sentenced. You engineers can plan all you want but you still need skilled workers. And there's a whole bunch of us out there who were underpayed for years and are now unemployed. Go figure.
"The concrete of the aqueduct,will last as long as the Pyramids of Egypt,Or the Parthenon of Athens, long after Joe Harryman is elected mayor of Los Angeles."
+1 for frank black lyrics donner.
#37, anonymous republican hack
Your numbers are wrong again.
Prop. 13 IS a big problem. The clueless legislators are the Republican ones that refuse to raise taxes.
For the record, folks, these are the pipes to bring fresh water into residences and businesses and such. That is a different system from the pipes that take waste water out of our homes and into the Hyperion Treatment Plant. And those, in turn, are separate from the stormwater pipes that just send the water straight into the ocean.
One thing about replacing underground infrastructure is that it causes very regrettable disruption of traffic, and creates noise and air pollution problems in the immediate vicinity. The sinkhole is bad, but have you any idea what the construction holes to replace the entire system will look like? It's not pretty. It's not safe. Bikers, walkers, strollers, forget it. Once a big underground infrastructure project sets up, be prepared to practice a very generous amount of patience for the very long haul.
I hope that the civil engineers and cities that hire them figure out ways to complete the projects more quickly, with less disruption. Perhpas higher tech solutions need to be applied here. Cutting-edge surgical techniques involve making very small incisions in the body. Aren't there some analogous methods for replacing underground pipes that don't involve splaying the street open for such long periods of time.
Simple explanation for "why now".
In the basement of a office in downtown LA, in the bottom of a file cabinet in an unlit room marked "Beware of Tiger", there is an expired warranty.
Its a government conspiracy