Manhole Cover-Up

Armed with a metal detector and a truckload of aging maps, Dwain Ulbrich spends his days scouring the landscape for a special sort of buried treasure.

Others might prospect for gold or drill for oil, but the city of Los Angeles has a more urgent task for Ulbrich. Street maintenance workers have paved over thousands of manhole covers around the city. Ulbrich has to find them.

“I use common sense, basically,” said Ulbrich, a city field engineer, as he waved his metal detector over a Northridge intersection the other day. “You get a feel for where they’re going to be.”

A 10-year city employee, Ulbrich now finds himself in the cross-fire of a bureaucratic skirmish at City Hall. Officials at the Bureau of Sanitation contend their counterparts at the Bureau of Street Services are wasting money by paving over the manholes--the primary means for entering the 6,500-mile sewer system--then having an engineer track them down.

In the first four months of the year, the city spent about $28,000 to locate 1,336 manholes, according to sanitation data.

“That’s money we don’t need to be spending,” said sanitation bureau Director Judy Wilson. A city employee is “high-priced talent. We could do something more low-tech.”

Rather than hunt for the manholes, Wilson said, workers could insert small rubber cones in the asphalt to mark their locations as they pave--a practice explored by a number of Southern California cities.

Once the manhole sites are marked--either by a cone sticking out of the pavement or by Ulbrich’s spray-paint--another crew jackhammers through the asphalt and raises the manhole a few inches to make it even with the street.

Greg Scott, director of street services, cautioned that the cones are not a foolproof method because work crews assigned to raise manholes could have trouble distinguishing between sewer manholes and those for other utilities.

But Scott said the city had ordered 100 cones as part of a pilot program as it races to resurface 150 miles of streets this year.

He said he was not aware sanitation officials had been complaining about the cost of locating the manhole covers.

“This kind of comes out of the blue,” he said.

The city’s contractor, Monterey Park-based Manhole Adjusting Contractors Inc., said the cones probably would not replace human surveyors.

“There’s no other way,” construction supervisor Darren Cook said. Even if the city used color-coordinated cones to tell different contractors which manholes to raise, Cook said, the city’s savings would probably be erased by an increase in the contractors’ bids.

Since January, sanitation bureau crews have taken over about one-third of the manhole work that had been contracted to Cook’s firm.

Wilson, the sanitation director, said her work crews have performed the job at a lower cost. Data from the department for the first four months of the year shows the city workers raised manholes for an average of $288 each, while the contractor did it for an average of $344 each.

But Wilson said the city would save even more if it found a more efficient way to track the manholes while paving.

Steve Healow, an engineer for the Federal Highway Administration, said cities often must pave over manholes to ensure the asphalt compacts evenly. But he said the Bureau of Street Services is very shortsighted to pave over the manholes without marking them at the same time.

“One [department] is undercutting another,” Healow said. “What’s needed is for the left hand to talk to the right hand.”