Cover the Reservoirs? Many Can’t See It

In the Los Angeles value system, a water view ranks high, up there with a sleek, fast car and Laker season tickets. The beach people watch the water from the shore, with close-up vistas of breaking waves. The canyon people see it from the mountains, where the most prized panoramas include a patch of distant ocean blue.

And while the reservoir people may have a less spectacular view, it affords them no less pleasure. From Elysian Park in the east to Pacific Palisades in the west, they jog and bicycle around, and gaze from windows and decks upon, their ersatz lakes.

No matter that most of the reservoirs are lined with concrete and regular in shape. No matter that intake valves and maintenance trucks are an integral part of the scene. The mere suggestion of nature in the city is enough.

But at reservoirs around Los Angeles, the waterfront life may be coming to an end.

The city Department of Water and Power is reviewing 10 of 15 open reservoirs as candidates for metal roofs or floating rubber covers to minimize exposure to potential health hazards.

Over the last decade, 45 open reservoirs around the state have been covered or replaced by holding tanks. But 70 more remain uncovered, and Los Angeles has more than any other water district in California.

The city’s recent efforts to change that have unleashed a sharp debate echoing similar controversies around California and in scattered locations across the country.

Sharp Debate

On one side are water treatment experts, who speak of trash and animal waste and carcinogens that could be shut out from the water supply if reservoirs are covered. They say the water in those reservoirs meets federal health standards now, but some of those standards are expected to change in the next three years.

On the other side are those who depend on reservoirs for visual pleasure as well as for drinking water. They question the necessity for drastic measures that would alter the character of their neighborhoods.

“There’s no problem now. They’re perceiving that in the future, there might be,” said Stephen Bost, who lives near the Santa Ynez Reservoir in Pacific Palisades. “I’m not buying that there’s not another method. . . . I don’t want to drink bad water and get cancer at the expense of a view. But damn it, if it’s not needed, why do it?”

Already, the Los Angeles Water and Power Department has placed a tan, corrugated aluminum roof on DeSoto Reservoir in Chatsworth. By next week, a black rubber cover, so strong a person could walk on it, will float on top of Eagle Rock Reservoir. DeSoto, however, is bordered by a freeway, and Eagle Rock can be seen only from the road to a nearby dump.

Now, in its first tentative steps to cover the visible reservoirs, the DWP is running into stiff opposition.

A group dedicated to preserving Elysian Park took the city to court to ensure environmental studies of a plan to spend $3 million to cover a reservoir there, which is bordered by a jogging path. In June, the city announced it would prepare a preliminary environmental impact report.

“They’ve got to have some responsiveness to being in a park,” said Sallie Neubauer, president of Save Elysian Park Committee. “They can’t just thumb their noses at the people.”

Homeowners in the Palisades Highlands, a mountainous community in Pacific Palisades, are also voicing their displeasure over the city’s vision for the Santa Ynez Reservoir. Their local reservoir is slated to get the rubber cover.

“What they’re talking about is the biggest dirty pool cover on this thing you ever saw,” said Bost, a 33-year-old lawyer, whose back yard view centers on the reservoir nestled in the hills.

‘A Black Hole’

“It’ll be a black hole on the other side of the canyon,” he said. “I say they lower the value of my home by doing it, and I don’t believe they have the right.”

City water officials acknowledge that a similar uproar is likely to attend efforts to cover some of the other reservoirs under study: Rowena in Los Feliz, Upper Stone Canyon in Bel-Air, Lower Franklin in the Santa Monica Mountains above Beverly Hills, Ivanhoe in the Silver Lake area, and Upper Hollywood.

“It’s not until you’ve lived next to one that you appreciate it,” said Diane Tracy, a 41-year-old free-lance writer. She has stayed in her apartment for eight years because it overlooks Rowena Reservoir. From the living room of her second-floor, one-bedroom apartment she sees the tops of pines and eucalyptus and an expanse of surface ripples.

“I hear the lapping of the water. When the afternoon breeze comes in across the lake, it’s like a big cooler. There’s a pump there, and I even like the sound of the swishing noise it makes,” she said. “It helps me get to sleep.”

Pump Station

The city has also targeted Green Verdugo Reservoir in Sunland, a small reservoir at the North Hollywood pump station and the Lower Van Norman Bypass Reservoir in Mission Hills for covers.

The reservoirs under consideration range in size from 3.2 to 14.6 acres.

The remaining open reservoirs--Silver Lake, Lower Hollywood, Lower Stone Canyon, Encino and Los Angeles in Sylmar--are more than 70 acres in surface area, too large to be covered, DWP officials decided.

Individual filtration plants will probably be built at each of the large reservoirs. But that poses its own problems: the plants cost $20 to $30 million each, and four to six acres of land to accommodate the plants must be found.

Both covers and filtration plants could be installed in three neighborhoods: Bel-Air, where homes ring the hills around both Upper and Lower Stone Canyon reservoirs; Silver Lake, where the community surrounds the connected Ivanhoe and Silver Lake reservoirs, and Hollywood, where pines and a popular jogging trail circle the adjacent Upper and Lower Hollywood reservoirs.

For more than 10 years, the state Health Services Department urged local utilities not to store potable water in open reservoirs once it has been treated. The state recommended covering distribution reservoirs in a 1974 letter to the DWP. The city was slow to respond.

“Mainly, it was cost, a decision of not spending money to cover them,” said Henry Venegas, the water system’s assistant engineer of design.

But Los Angeles became a target for the state after the $146-million Sylmar filtration plant was completed in late 1986.

After the water is filtered, it is distributed to the reservoirs, just a pipeline away from consumers’ faucets.

“That’s why the push is on now,” said Tim Gannon, an official with the state health department’s public water supply branch. “Because you have this treated water, beautiful water. The quality now is great. It’s a shame to have it sitting out in those open reservoirs.”

The risks, he said, are many and varied:

- Sea gulls that forage in landfills and drop their pickings in coastal reservoirs.

- Beavers, like the ones that called a Nevada reservoir home, leading to an outbreak of severe diarrhea among water customers.

- African clawed frogs, like the million or so that were pulled from San Joaquin Reservoir, near Newport Beach, in 1984.

Even though chlorine is added to water as it is carried to taps, the disinfectant does not provide as thorough a cleansing as the Sylmar plant does.

“Is that enough (contamination) to hurt us or not?” said Bruce Elms, standards engineer for a trade group, the Denver-based American Water Works Assn. “We’re getting to where we say, ‘We don’t know. But prudence says if it’s there, get it out.’ And we’re able to sense (pollutants’) presence more, to measure smaller and smaller amounts.”

Another concern is trihalomethanes (THMs), a class of compounds that includes chloroform. Studies during the 1970s showed that rats and mice develop liver and kidney cancer from exposure to THMs. Algae combined with chlorine forms THMs.

In 1979, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded that drinking supplies should not contain more than 100 parts of THMs for every billion parts of water.

The Los Angeles reservoirs easily meet that test. Venegas said they contain THMs in the 30- to 35-p.p.b. range.

But the EPA plans to revise its THM standard by January, 1991. Venegas said he anticipates the limit to be lowered to the 20- to 50-p.p.b. range, although “that’s their guess, not ours,” said Steve Clark, an official in the EPA’s Office of Drinking Water in Washington.

Getting rid of the chlorine is not a good idea, Clark said, because the chemical stops cholera, typhoid and parasites.

A roof or cover, however, would cut off sunlight, Venegas said, which would prevent algae from blooming, thus reducing the THM level.

Elsewhere, these aims have been accomplished while nearby residents were mollified at the same time.

In the Oakland-Berkeley area, for example, the East Bay Municipal Water District put landscaping and reflecting pools on top of sturdy roofs at three of six covered reservoirs. In Orange County the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is considering storing drinking water balloons beneath the surface of San Joaquin Reservoir. Venegas would like to avoid such costly measures here.

“We ought not to take money that the water consumer pays for his water and use it for recreation or views in certain parts of the city,” he said. “We are in the business of providing water.”

COVERING L.A.’S RESERVOIRS

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is reviewing 10 of its 15 open reservoirs as candidates for metal roofs or floating rubber covers to minimize exposure to potential health hazards. Two reservoirs already have covers, the DeSoto Reservoir in Chatsworth and Eagle Rock Reservoir.

1--Lower Van Norman

Bypass Reservoir

Location: Mission Hills

In Service Since: 1970

Area served: Most of Los Angeles

Surface Area: 12.0 acres

Capacity: 78 million gallons

2--Green Verdugo Reservoir

Location: Sunland

In Service Since: 1953

Area Served: Sunland-Tujunga

Surface Area: 3.2 acres

Capacity: 32 million gallons

3--Santa Ynez Reservoir

Location: Pacific Palisades

In Service Since: 1970

Area Served: Pacific Palisades

Surface Area: 9.2 acres

Capacity: 117 million gallons

4--Upper Stone Canyon Reservoir

Location: Santa Monica Mountains,

Bel-Air

In Service Since: 1954

Area Served: West Los Angeles

Surface Area: 14.6 acres

Capacity: 138 million gallons

5--Lower Franklin Reservoir

Location: Santa Monica Mountains,

above Beverly Hills

In Service Since: 1982

Area Served: Hollywood, West and Central Los Angeles

Surface Area: 9.9 acres

Capacity: 67 million gallons

6--Upper Hollywood Reservoir

Location: Hollywood Hills

In Service Since: 1933

Area Served: Hollywood and

Hollywood Hills

Surface Area: 8.0 acres

Capacity: 64 million gallons

7--Rowena Reservoir

Location: Los Feliz

In Service Since: 1911

Area Served: Central Los Angeles

Surface Area: 5.7 acres

Capacity: 31 million gallons

8--Ivanhoe Reservoir

Location: Silver Lake

In Service Since: 1906 (enlarged 1952)

Area Served: Central Los Angeles

Surface Area: 7.8 acres

Capacity: 59 million gallons

9--Elysian Reservoir

Location: Elysian Park

In Service Since: 1903

Area Served: Downtown and East

Los Angeles

Surface Area: 6.2 acres

Capacity: 55 million gallons

10--North Hollywood Sump

Location: North Hollywood

A one-acre reservoir used to prime pumps at the North Hollywood pumping station