Los Angeles' 15-year struggle to upgrade its water system has reached its final hurdle: negotiating the fate of two vintage reservoirs, one just north of downtown, the other in a wealthy canyon enclave on the Westside.
Facing new water regulations prohibiting open-air reservoirs of potable water, the city would prefer to cover Elysian and Upper Stone Canyon reservoirs with fabric, metal or concrete. But local residents are fighting to have the sites somehow reclaimed as parkland or open space.
Final determinations, which are expected later this year, will mark a historic juncture for Los Angeles, which has long outgrown its century-old network of 10 asphalt and cement watering holes. Some are still being used to store drinking water. Others are being maintained for emergency use only. But by 2015, all will have been removed from service, covered or replaced by tanks.
Once, they were sparkling icons of urban growth. They also were a source of municipal pride, storage grounds for an elegant, gravity-powered aqueduct system that delivered Eastern Sierra water to the expanding metropolis.
They became a liability in the early 1990s when the state and federal government began issuing laws to protect municipal water supplies from pathogens, toxic runoff and terrorist attacks. Ever since the city Department of Water and Power launched a $2.3-billion effort to comply with the new rules, anger and fear have simmered in neighborhoods that cherished their views of open water.
"Our backs are to the wall to get everything done quickly," said Martin L. Adams, the DWP's director of water quality and operations.
It's not just Los Angeles. The number of open drinking water reservoirs in the United States has shrunk from 750 in 1975 to only 115 in 2007.
Six of those are still operating in the city -- Elysian, Ivanhoe, Los Angeles, Santa Ynez Canyon, Silver Lake and Upper Stone Canyon reservoirs. Four in the city are no longer used for drinking water supplies -- Encino, Upper and Lower Hollywood, and Lower Stone Canyon, near UCLA.
It took time to develop alternate plans for eight of the city's reservoirs -- five to 10 years in some cases. It didn't help that the DWP initially failed to notify neighborhoods near reservoirs of its desire to, as one resident put it, "slap big bland covers on them."
But compromises were brokered during years of often contentious but productive meetings between DWP officials and an umbrella group of concerned citizens called the Coalition to Preserve Open Reservoirs.
