When water mains break. The “Super Bowl” effect?
Posted on | September 8, 2009 | 1 Comment
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 pipes could take it. As the stock response went, the spikes and troughs in demand would allow them to read most clearly how much water was being conserved.
An aside: Pity the General Manager sent out by his technical people with that response if the technical people were wrong.
To DWP’s delight, it chocked up nearly 20% savings.
Then the pipes started breaking at an unusually fast rate. Some put total loss to leaks in Los Angeles as high as 10% in normal times, without the Super Bowl effect.
So, a question: If you lose 10% of your water through leaks and save 20% through two-day watering ordinances, and leaks are sprouting across the system because of aging infrastructure, what can you do?
Spreading out watering days while shortening allowable watering times might be one answer, but it would be harder to enforce and might usher in general back-sliding.
What else could the department do to speed up its routine program of replacing aging pipes?
Raise prices. The problem here? It causes people to scream about their bills when they are not screaming about the leaks.
For Steve Greenberg’s cartoon Drip Happens at LA Observed, click here.
For LADWP updates and contacts, click here.
This page has been updated.
The week that was: Shall we drown?
Posted on | September 6, 2009 | No Comments
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 smothering humidity, Madousou Konneh and about a half-dozen youngsters, including her 14-year-old sister, Mafata, trudged two miles to a bend in the Schuylkill near Bartram’s Garden and across the river from rail yards and tank farms of the Hess Refinery and Philadelphia Gas Works — Philadelphia Inquirer on the drowning of 9-year-old Maudouso Konneh after the closure of 46 city-run pools
Click here for the rest of the Labor Day edition of The week that was
Water in Venice
Posted on | September 5, 2009 | No Comments
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
Posted on | September 4, 2009 | No Comments
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 and beyond the Mediterranean basin to countries around the world with similar climate zones (most of California included), it becomes clear that this Frenchman’s true regard is for dryness. Drought, Filippi begins, is not a limitation, but the source of untold diversity from regions in the Mediterranean, South Africa, South America, Australia and California.
To keep reading this week’s Los Angeles Times Dry Garden column, click here.
Click on the click
Posted on | September 1, 2009 | No Comments
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