Water Los Angeles

Concerned that chromium 6 contamination in the San Fernando Valley aquifer will prevent them from pumping well water, Los Angeles and other cities are quietly exploring steps to recoup losses and cleanup costs from Lockheed Martin Corp. and other companies suspected of causing the problem, officials said Friday. The aquifer, which supplies up to 15% of the water supply for Los Angeles, was contaminated over decades through manufacturing in the East Valley.

An experiment to charge solo drivers to use speedier carpool lanes on two of Los Angeles' most congested freeways has hit renewed opposition in Congress as two influential lawmakers ? a Republican and a Democrat ? say the plan is unfair to taxpayers and would create a two-tier transportation system for rich and poor. Rep. Gary G. Miller of Diamond Bar, the senior California Republican on the House Transportation Committee, said the toll of up to $1.40 a mile during peak periods "absolutely infuriates me. " Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles)

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has failed to adequately plan for the city's future water needs either through conservation or development of new water sources, according to a sweeping management audit released Thursday. The audit, conducted over six months at a cost of $1.2 million, concludes that planning for new sources of water "should receive immediate attention."

Prominent Democratic Reps. Maxine Waters and Charles B. Rangel will face ethics trials after the November elections, the head of the House Ethics Committee announced Thursday, in what will be rare, back-to-back congressional proceedings. The trial for Waters (D-Los Angeles) will begin Nov. 29. The proceedings for Rangel (D-New York) are scheduled to begin Nov. 15. "After an investigation that has lasted over a year, I am eager to have the opportunity to clear my name," Waters said in a statement Thursday.

After five years of difficult negotiations, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has received approval to launch its biggest construction project in a decade--a $160-million complex of underground water storage tanks and pipelines at Lake Hollywood that will dramatically alter the natural landscape and cause substantial street disruptions on the Westside for up to three years.

Officials from the Los Angeles Department of Public Works met Wednesday with a Saudi Arabian delegation to discuss the expensive but feasible process of producing drinking water from the ocean. More than 75% of drinking water in Saudi Arabia is produced by removing salt and other materials from seawater or badly contaminated ground water. Saudi officials said the same process could be used to ease Southern California's water woes.

Los Angeles is flush with excess. From the founding of the Village of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula in 1781 until engineer William Mulholland figured out eight decades ago how to drain the Owens River on the eastern side of the Sierra into parched Los Angeles, water has defined Los Angeles. But in this Infotechnic Age, the problem isn't so much getting water out of the tap as it is getting it down the drain.

Ground was broken for a $6-million water recycling project in Westchester Thursday, the plan calling for a pipeline to distribute recycled water on the Westside. The four-mile pipeline will connect to an existing water line and treatment plant in El Segundo and will transport the used water to customers for landscape and industrial use in Westchester, officials said.

The cost of water in Los Angeles--and around the state--is expected to skyrocket in the coming decade as water agencies wrestle with the worsening problems of supply and quality, officials said Thursday.

There is bad news and good news flowing from the rugged, snow-capped peaks of the eastern Sierra, the most important source of water for 3.8 million customers in Los Angeles. With relatively light snowfall during the past winter, runoff is expected to be just 76% of normal, according to experts at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Despite the subpar flow, DWP officials say there will be adequate water supplies to meet customer demands in the coming year.

The House Ethics Committee is investigating Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who has come under scrutiny because of her husband's ties to a bank that received federal bailout funds. The panel's chairwoman and ranking member announced the committee was extending by 45 days a determination on whether it would conduct a more thorough review of Waters' conduct, but they declined to say what was being investigated. Waters, one of Los Angeles' most enduring liberal politicians, also declined to comment.

Male fish with female characteristics have been discovered in ocean waters off Los Angeles and Orange counties, raising concerns that treated sewage released offshore contains hormone-disrupting compounds that are deforming the sex organs of marine life. Scientists around the world have found sexual abnormalities in frogs, fish, alligators and other wild animals exposed to sewage effluent and industrial contaminants that mimic estrogens and other hormones.

A dispute over the size of a pump is jeopardizing an agreement between the city of Los Angeles and the Owens Valley that had been supposed to ease nearly a century of discord over water policy. The argument centers on a plan to use water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct to restore 61 miles of the lower Owens River. Some of that water would then be pumped from the reborn river back into the aqueduct. The sticking point is how much water and how big a pump the city needs for the task.

There is bad news and good news flowing from the rugged, snow-capped peaks of the eastern Sierra, the most important source of water for 3.8 million customers in Los Angeles. With relatively light snowfall during the past winter, runoff is expected to be just 76% of normal, according to experts at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Despite the subpar flow, DWP officials say there will be adequate water supplies to meet customer demands in the coming year.

So much water is pumped in and out of underground aquifers in the Los Angeles area that much of the landscape rises and falls more than 4 inches each year--a finding that is unsettling the calculations of the region's earthquake hazards. The surprising discovery is the product of a new $20-million seismic monitoring network of 250 satellite surveying stations and an orbiting imaging radar satellite.

Some things never seem to change in the Owens Valley. The wind, the giant leap of the Eastern Sierra peaks, the water feuds. More than half a century after Los Angeles locked up the rights to every trickle of water it could squeeze from the valley 250 miles away, a handful of Paiute tribal groups insist some of that water belongs to them.

What a complex relationship we have with water in Los Angeles. We send pipelines hundreds of miles into the interior to find it. We boil our pasta in it, put it on our lawns and cars, and swim in it. A few of us even drink it, though more and more are quenching that thirst in the bottled water aisle of the market. Once we're done with all the water we bring down from the mountains, we dump it in the ocean. It's a mirage, all this water in a desert land.

Although leaning toward siding with Los Angeles in a decades-old water war, the California Air Resources Board on Friday gave the city and Owens Valley one month to strike a compromise on how to stop immense dust storms at Owens Lake. More divided than it has been in years, the board was clearly split over whether to uphold a massive, multimillion-dollar dust control project that was ordered by Owens Valley air quality officials last summer.

Two massive water tanks, the largest structures of their type in the world, are about to be buried under tons of earth in the Hollywood Hills. Before they disappear, the public can get a peek at the newly built Toyon tanks on Saturday during an open house being hosted by the Department of Water and Power.

The San Diego County water board voted Thursday to file a lawsuit to overturn a half-century-old regulation that gives Los Angeles the right, during a drought, to deprive San Diego County of more than half of its water supply. After griping about the issue since 1951, the San Diego County agency has decided that it cannot plan its future with such uncertainty about water.