Home Flooding Traced to Leak From Reservoir

When Sam Soon’s golden retriever began digging in the mushy flower beds in early November, Soon first noticed that his house seemed ready to set sail.

At about the same time, four houses away, Alex Tenorio first spotted water bubbling from a crack in his driveway and pooling around the morning newspaper.

The two men didn’t know that they shared a common problem: the earth under their houses had become a swamp.

Each complained to City Hall, where officials told them to call a plumber, which they did. Tenorio even had to throw in a pair of Lakers tickets to persuade one plumber to come on a weekend. But the plumbers could find no leaks, nor did Tenorio find any clues when he crawled in the muck under his and his neighbors’ houses.

Eventually, Soon called Councilwoman Judy Chu who, in turn, persuaded city officials to take a closer look as walls in the houses seemed to shift, ceilings started to crack and doorways jammed.

“It became obvious,” City Manager Mark Lewis said, “that it was a bigger problem than somebody’s drain backing up.”

On Monday, divers in the nearby Garvey Reservoir found at least part of the answer to the mystery of why more than a dozen houses appeared as if they might float from their hillside perches: a 1-foot-wide, 6-foot-deep hole in the bottom of the 41-acre reservoir, which sits in a huge bowl and overlooks the western San Gabriel Valley city.

“It would be foolish to say that this hole we found in the reservoir lining doesn’t have something to do with the problems of the houses,” Charles E. Nichols said Tuesday as he surveyed the vast, newly empty reservoir from its rim. He is chief engineer of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which operates the 35-year-old reservoir.

Initially, despite several weeks of finger-pointing from Monterey Park residents and officials, the water district had been reluctant to accept that the reservoir was directly connected to the flooding of the Fulton Drive neighborhood of single-family houses. The reservoir is located uphill and about 1,000 feet east of Fulton Drive.

“This is very uncommon. We’ve never had this situation before,” said district spokesman Bob Gomperz, shortly before the hole was discovered.

During the last week, the district had even undertaken “water fingerprinting tests,” Gomperz said, to see if reservoir water matched the water in the yards of the houses. But those tests were inconclusive and became moot once the hole was discovered.

Even before the discovery Monday, the water district had begun draining the reservoir, which is covered by a heavy, black liner that floats on the surface.

By Tuesday, the 70-foot deep reservoir had been drained nearly dry so that additional inspections could be conducted and repairs could begin. The water from the reservoir, one of eight in the district and a major source for drinkable water in Los Angeles County, was diverted to other parts of the system.

It could take three months to complete the inspection and repairs, which chief engineer Nichols called expensive and complicated. Because rainy, cooler weather has arrived, it will be less of a problem that the reservoir can’t be used for some time, Nichols said.

The repairs will involve using huge air pumps to inflate the floating liner, one of the largest of its kind in the world. Also, small bulldozers and paving equipment may have to be used to repair the reservoir bottom, which is coated with a layer of asphalt over a 10-foot-thick clay liner.

At a meeting Monday, the City Council unanimously called for the water district to determine the cause of the hole and the cracks radiating from it.

The council also requested the district to cover all the expenses to the city and homeowners as a result of the leak and to take over the water-pumping operation at five homes. The city began pumping water away from the homes’ foundations after residents complained at a council meeting. Since there have been no full structural inspections of the houses, no one knows what the long-term effects of the flooding will be.

In addition, the council voted to hold discussions on the possible relocation of the reservoir.

In a letter that had been prepared for mailing to the water district just before the hole was discovered, City Manager Lewis complained of the “extremely dangerous situation.”

Tenorio, 47, invoked the collapse of a dam in Baldwin Hills 26 years ago as he sloshed through the mud and water around his garage Tuesday. In the 1963 dam collapse, portions of a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power dam gave way, and 290 million gallons of water and debris cascaded into a neighborhood. Five people were killed, 64 residences destroyed and many other houses were severely damaged.

“I’ve got these vivid memories of that,” Tenorio said. “We just know that in layman’s terms that if you’re sitting on a sea of mud and you get a little quake, something’s got to give. That hillside is going to come down on me.”

But Nichols said the Baldwin Dam collapse could not be compared to the situation at the Garvey Reservoir.

“This was never a life-threatening situation,” he said. “Even had this been allowed to go unattended . . . I doubt it would have developed into anything like (Baldwin Hills). We’re very aware of our obligations and responsibilities.

“We hope to help them and, at least for now, get rid of the immediate nuisance from outside their doorsteps,” he said.

On Wednesday, the water district hand-delivered invitations to residents of Fulton Drive asking them to attend a community meeting on Saturday at 10 a.m. at the reservoir.

Beyond that, he said the district has maintained constant contact with the Division of Safety of Dams in the state Department of Water Resources.

But even beyond these assurances, city officials say they want a full accounting of what happened and what the district will do to ensure safety in the future.

“I’m pretty concerned,” Councilwoman Chu said at Monday night’s meeting. “Why wasn’t this detected earlier?”

And Councilman Barry L. Hatch said, “We need to have the reservoir removed. . . . Our residents come first. Whatever caused the crack, it’s going to happen again. Let’s be firm in our demands.”

City Manager Lewis said the city wants the district to conduct an “a full environmental impact statement to assure us and the residents that the reservoir is a safe project and that it can be rebuilt.”

“It wouldn’t make any sense to do any repair unless they look at the underlying geological problems of what caused the crack,” Lewis said.

City and water district officials have raised the possibility that the Whittier earthquake in 1987 and one centered in Montebello in June may have contributed to creation of the hole.

On Tuesday, Soon and Tenorio walked around Soon’s swimming pool. At one point in recent weeks the pool had overflowed because of the influx of underground water. “Sam’s wife has been worried sick,” Tenorio said. “At night we can’t go to sleep.”

Their worries--along with the sounds of water pumps the city has installed around their houses--interrupt their sleep, he said.

And, when Tenorio’s wife rises in the middle of the night from their water bed, the sloshing sound frightens him.

“I think the house is sliding,” he said. “If it wasn’t so tragic, it’d almost be funny.”

Times staff writer Luz Villarreal contributed to this report.