L.A.’s Down and Dirty Sewers

Last week’s El Nino-driven rains made a chronically bad situation abysmal in some of the city’s older neighborhoods. The storms caused an unprecedented 20 million gallons of sewage to spill from pipes long ago pushed beyond their capacity. The intolerable health risk that resulted should jump-start the City Council on a long-stalled plan to replace some 70-year-old pipes.

Waste water diluted with storm runoff overflowed at 45 locations, dumping millions of gallons into Santa Monica Bay and neighborhood streets throughout the city. The worst problems occurred in South-Central, along 11.5 miles of ancient, badly corroded pipe. There waste water flowed through busy intersections, onto residential lawns and near school grounds.

El Nino has only exacerbated an already bad situation in that part of the city. Sewage stench and overflows happen all too often, rainstorm or not. Pipes installed for a 1920s Los Angeles now run nearly full even in dry weather. Replacement must be a matter of when and not if.

Plans call for running a supplementary line parallel to the existing “north outfall sewer,” which flows underneath much of South-Central. Once that’s in place, city engineers could repair the old sewer. Both lines would remain, greatly expanding the city’s sewage capacity and eliminating overflows.

Funding this mammoth project is less a problem than managing the disruption it will cause. The estimated $230 million to $260 million will come from the sewer service charge assessed monthly on water and power customers. But city engineers and the City Council have yet to decide on key design issues, much less to plan for the two to three years of disruption and hassle that construction will cause.

At best the work will get underway by mid-2000. In the meantime, the council, at the urging of Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, has asked city engineers to report next week on short-term fixes such as sewer bypasses or stepped-up chlorination. The situation is an intolerable health risk. No delays can be accepted.