A second burst water line in the San Fernando Valley in less than 72 hours -- creating a sinkhole that nearly consumed a firetruck -- prompted concern about the city's aging pipe system and criticism that officials have moved too slowly to upgrade it.
The sinkhole appeared Tuesday morning in Valley Village, about two miles from the spot where a 95-year-old trunk line failed late Saturday night, sending a 10-foot torrent of mud and water into the streets of Studio City and inundating homes and businesses.
The incidents follow what Councilman Tom LaBonge said had been "a rash" of water-line breaks around his district in recent weeks, including some in Hancock Park, Los Feliz, Hollywood and Koreatown. He said he would formally ask the Department of Water and Power today to brief the council on the situation.
"There is an epidemic going on. . . . It seems too coincidental that all these things are failing. We don't realize how old our system is. It's really the same pipes that have been here 100 years," he said, noting that some had been installed under the direct supervision of William Mulholland himself, the storied architect of the city's water network.
DWP officials, however, said that the leaks were nothing out of the ordinary -- city pipes fail about 1,400 times a year, a decrease from the recent past -- and that the city was making great progress on a $4-billion program to upgrade its subterranean water system.
"We can't always be ahead of what is going to happen," said DWP General Manager David Nahai, noting that the system is "aging and deteriorating." But he added that the department "has an aggressive program in place to do the repairs necessary." DWP officials also said Los Angeles has fewer leaks per mile of pipe than many other big cities.
Some 7,200 miles of pipe -- moving about 600 million gallons of water each day -- run beneath the city's streets. Much of the infrastructure dates from the 1920s and the years just after World War II, two periods when housing construction boomed.
Key to the upgrade are fixes to the 5-foot-wide trunk lines, which move water from aqueducts into the city and from reservoir to reservoir based on demand. Over the last five years, officials have replaced about nine miles of trunk line; 32 more miles are scheduled to be replaced in coming years. In 2008, the City Council authorized rate increases totaling about $2 a month per customer to pay for these and other repairs.
