Standing Watch on L.A.’s Waterworks

The terrorist threat level stood at orange, and Jim Yannotta looked a little green.

He was fighting airsickness in a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power helicopter. The aging Bell Long Ranger bucked fierce winds on a security tour of the city’s reservoirs, storage tanks and aqueducts -- all considered possible terrorism targets.

“We’ve got daily patrols on the ground and by air,” said Yannotta, the DWP’s assistant director for water quality and operations. As the chopper swooped over the Santa Monica Mountains, he swallowed as if he had ingested a bad oyster, his hand on his stomach.

“Everybody is being a lot more vigilant.”

Braving bumpy-sky nausea isn’t in Yannotta’s job description. But things have come to this.

For a century, the DWP has had a tough enough task, just delivering water to arid Los Angeles, drawing the life’s blood from as far away as the Sierra Nevada.

Now, the agency also must protect the water against chemicals, germs and bombs.

“Prior to Sept. 11, security wasn’t that big a concern to me,” Yannotta said. Back then, he fretted about algae and vandalism, kids with skateboards cutting through a fence.

Times have become so much more tense -- especially since the start of the war in Iraq -- that his helicopter pilots and other security officers decline to be interviewed.

They cite fears of endangering themselves and their families: What if a terrorist learns their routines? Learns where they live?

Yannotta, a New Jersey native, hesitated to disclose information about his own wife and daughter.

“There’s just more stress,” he said. “I mean, I’ve always been on call, but now?” He widened his eyes. “I don’t have a 9-to-5 job.”

His job is to watch over one of the most complex waterworks on Earth.

The DWP maintains 23 reservoirs, two aqueducts, 90 storage tanks, 7,100 miles of pipe, and scores of pumping, chlorination, fluoridation and pressure-regulation stations.

Its customers use roughly 215 billion gallons of water a year, or 155 gallons a day per person.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials, who issue the color-coded terrorism advisories, say it would be difficult to poison a water system as vast as the DWP’s.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, they add. They also worry that saboteurs might try to blow up a dam.

Even a failed attempt to spike or disrupt water supplies could trigger panic, said Homeland Security spokesman David Wray.

“With most terror weapons, that’s the purpose,” he said. “It’s the fear they generate.”

So the DWP is spending millions to tighten access to and surveillance of its water and structures.

It has bought two more helicopters, doubling its fleet.

Around-the-clock patrols of reservoirs have begun.

New fences, walls and security cameras are going up.

Tests for toxins in the water have increased 50%.

“We test for over 180 compounds,” said Yannotta, speaking into a headset from the chopper’s cramped rear seat.

The noise inside the six-passenger craft was like that of a wobbly washing machine on spin cycle.

“We have a very reliable system, a very stout system.”

Yannotta is an engineer by training, with degrees from Cal State Northridge and USC. Before joining the DWP 16 years ago, he worked in maintenance and construction at the Veterans Administration.

His current duties largely confine him to a map- and book-lined office in the DWP’s downtown headquarters. The Bell helicopter had lifted off from the roof of the 15-story building.

“I don’t take these tours very often,” Yannotta said above the din. “I have my staff do this.... I have a great security staff.”

The reservoirs did not come into view until the chopper was well into its climb, at an elevation where the city resembled a scale model of itself. They appeared as ovals and fingers of sparkling blue, tucked behind emerald hillsides or hidden in tawny canyons.

“See?” Yannotta said, pointing at the window. Below were the Silver Lake and Ivanhoe reservoirs, deserted except for security officers. “These reservoirs are completely fenced.... And there’s security 24-7.”

Next was the “former” Rowena Reservoir, so labeled because its 10 million gallons have been buried in underground tanks. On top of them sits a decorative fake lake -- “a water feature,” Yannotta called it.

Within five to 10 years, the DWP plans to bury, cover or bypass the seven remaining reservoirs in the city. The project is a result of stricter clean-water standards, not terrorism jitters, but it should ease the security burden.

“It will help, certainly,” Yannotta said.

The DWP has eight other reservoirs along the twin Los Angeles Aqueducts. The channels carry water 338 miles and 233 miles from the Mono Basin and Owens Valley, respectively.

Most stretches of the aqueducts are covered. Their reservoirs will stay open to the air because the water is not filtered and treated until it reaches Los Angeles.

“Ninety-five percent of it is treated there,” Yannotta said. The chopper was hovering above the Los Angeles Reservoir, the DWP’s biggest, in the San Fernando Valley. It replaced part of the Van Norman Reservoir, which was drained after its lower dam cracked in the 1971 Sylmar earthquake.

Dam failures have haunted the DWP. In 1928, the St. Francis Dam burst above what is now Santa Clarita, and the flood killed at least 450 people. Five died when the Baldwin Hills Dam gave way in 1963.

Yannotta thinks about those disasters.

“We wish we knew what the terrorists were up to, but that’s an unrealistic expectation,” he said, as the copter swayed like a Ferris wheel car. “Our goal is to basically try to deter anything.”

He gulped hard, the belly blues rising.