This Job Can Be Draining

Last Tuesday, 57 feet above the cafe au lait-colored water churning through the Sepulveda Dam’s outlet channel in Encino, dam keeper Dave Manring was speaking assurances to the police lieutenant.

From where they stood in the pelting rain, the vista was this:

In front of the dam was a green slope, a damp concrete spillway, busy traffic on the San Diego Freeway-Ventura Freeway interchange, neighborhoods sulking in a gray mist.

Behind the dam was a new brown lake.

The thought of the former becoming the latter was what troubled Lt. Bob Tumas, watch commander of the LAPD’s Van Nuys Division.

“I had the gates raised to four feet,” Manring told him, “and I just raised them to five feet. When they get enough control downstream, we’ll probably go up to nine, and this thing’ll drop as fast as it rose.”

“So pretty much we’ve got a handle on it?” Tumas asked.

“Right.”

As the water level in the Sepulveda Basin behind the dam reached its peak of 693.5 feet above sea level--21.5 feet above the basin floor--so did the demand for Dave Manring.

Police officers, firefighters, CHP officers, a federal emergency management representative and TV camera crews in matching rain slickers invaded the spare concrete control house where the 36-year-old dam keeper ordinarily labors in solitude.

The questions flew at him during Tuesday’s rain, the same way they figure to do every time a heavy storm hits this season:

Would more water-laden clouds wheel in over the Santa Monica Mountains and dump on the saturated 152-square-mile watershed? Would the water level reach the point where it would breach the dam’s seven automatic crest gates and flow into the spillway, and head for the freeways and the neighborhoods? Would there be havoc? (Would there be great video footage?)

*

Manring, a laconic man with a clutch of keys dangling at the waist of his uniform pants, explained that, yes, if the water reached about 714 feet above sea level, a 10-foot-high wall of water 500 feet long would be unleashed.

There was little chance of that, however. In 1993, it had gotten to its highest point ever, 709 feet, he said, but the higher the level, the more water it takes to raise it another increment.

Asked what the level might reach by the end of that day, Manring shrugged.

“I can’t predict the weather,” he told a police officer. “Mother Nature’s Mother Nature,” he told a reporter.

Police officers bundled Manring off to Fire Station No. 88, where a task force of representatives from the LAPD, Los Angeles County Fire Department, California Highway Patrol and others could jointly hear the prognostications of the reluctant sage of Sepulveda Dam.

While he was there, at nine minutes before noon Tuesday, word came from the Army Corps of Engineers’ downtown Los Angeles office, where the operations of the Corps’ 19 dams in the Los Angeles area are coordinated. Sepulveda’s four outlet channel gates should be raised to their maximum nine-foot height, the central office ordered.

*

Dave Hamrick, an El Monte-based dam equipment repairman assigned to Sepulveda for the day, turned the valves that activated the 10-horsepower electric motor that ran the pump that lifted the giant hydraulic gates, one at a time. The job was done at 12:15. The volume of water rampaging through the outlet channel, on its semi-circuitous route via the Los Angeles River to the sea at Long Beach, swelled from 8,400 cubic feet a second to 10,800.

By the time Manring returned, the brown lake behind the dam had begun to drop. It fell to 692.5 feet above sea level, then to 691.5 and 690.5. “We’re draining the pool,” Manring murmured.

By late afternoon, Manring had the concrete mausoleum of the control house, with its telephone klaxon, mostly to himself again.

“Now that there isn’t a panic, nobody’s here,” he observed with a smile. “I guess TV doesn’t explain all this enough to people, and that’s why when it rains hard, everybody gets a heart attack.”