When water mains break. The “Super Bowl” effect?

9/19/2009 UPDATE After weeks of leaks in LA’s water mains, there are too many to count off one by one. Instead, the Los Angeles Times now has a map of breaks. Click here to see if you can expect treated potable water to burst through a street sinkhole near you. Elsewhere in the Times reporter Jessica Garrison finds experts who wonder if the problem isn’t pressure changes resulting from two-day-week water rationing?

I hate to say that I wondered it first, because Garrison, her quotable experts, and others at the Times no doubt wondered it early on too. The idea is as old the joke about what happens to city plumbing during Super Bowl commercials.

When questioned by myself and others from the June outset of the two-day-week lawn watering ordinance about the effect of changing pressure on city pipes, the Department of Water and Power insisted that its …

The week that was: Shall we drown?

Whether we underestimate water or overestimate ourselves, at no time do we drown more energetically than during summer holidays. The poor drown, the rich drown, and, above all, children drown. For facts, figures and tips, click here to be taken to the Centers for Disease Control.

Or read on for a special Labor Day weekend edition of drowning in the news in this, The Week that Was.

“They don’t have life vests, but the dogs do.” Wanda Jones observing her daughter and their friends float past in inner tubes on the American River with two Chihuahuas — Sacramento Bee

“It’s too early to comment at this time as to what the outcome might be.” A duty inspector with the Sussex, UK, police last week on the investigation into the 1969 drowning of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, Associated Press

Tuesday, amid a heat wave of 90-plus-degree days and …

Water in Venice

A Western Grebe in Mendocino County, California. This photograph by Ron LeValley is part of “H2O,” an exhibit on water by four photographers at the G2 Gallery in Venice. The other contributors are Michele Westmorland, Eric Chen and Elizabeth Carmel. For information on the exhibit, which runs until September 20, and other water-related events sponsored by the gallery, click here.…

The Dry Garden: The Frenchman’s guide to (not) watering

COFFEE table books on gardening are generally so useless that it has been tempting to ask publishers to send review copies straight to the dump. Yet when Joan DeFato, retired librarian of the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden, came to lunch bearing a big specimen that was not so much glossy as positively lacquered, I sat down and read it. Disbelief mounted with every turn of the page of the Thames & Hudson offering, “The Dry Gardening Handbook: Plants and Practices for a Changing Climate.”

This was a beauty queen with brains.

The author is nurseryman Olivier Filippi. A Frenchman, Filippi betrays an understandable fondness for the dry plants of his native garrigue, the French version of our chaparral. His writing is most poetic when touching on the “thick and sticky smell” of rockroses and the like. Yet as he pushes out beyond the south of France …