Crews have completed repairs to part of L.A.’s water system and plan to restore water service for thousands of residents in Granada Hills and Porter Ranch who have been dealing with a days-long outage, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said Sunday afternoon.
DWP officials are continuing to urge residents, however, to hold off on using the water until service is fully restored and testing has confirmed the water is safe to drink and use.
After cutting and removing a broken valve underground, workers on Sunday finished welding a new section of pipe into place.
“We’ve begun filling a section of the pipe with water to help prepare the rest of the affected system to begin receiving water,” said Ellen Cheng, a DWP spokesperson. “We’re making progress, but we actually need customers to still not use tap water because a lot of work is still happening in the field.”
The department aims to have water service restored for about 9,200 customers in the area on Monday morning. However, a notice is still in effect urging residents to boil water for safety before using it. That DWP could lift that boil order as soon as Tuesday, once testing is completed.
“We want to ask customers to still refrain from using water until we give the all-clear,” Cheng said.
The problem arose on Tuesday, when a valve that controls the flow of water broke during repairs at a pump station that supplies a 10-million-gallon water tank.
The valve that broke was installed in 1967, officials said. It was stuck in a nearly closed position and could not be opened, which impeded the flow of water.
The work of reaching the valve 20 feet underground was complicated because, as workers dug to reach it, they encountered fiber-optic cable, a high-pressure gas line and an oil line, said Anselmo Collins, DWP senior assistant general manager.
“We are doing this as quickly as possible, but also as safely as possible,” Collins said in an interview. “I think they did an excellent job in fixing that, considering all the circumstances and utilities that were in the way.
“I know it’s very frustrating for our customers, but I think we’ve made a lot of progress under difficult circumstances,” Collins said. “We are getting close to getting this issue resolved and restoring normal supply to the region.”
Over the last few days, city officials have urged residents not to use water that has started to come out of their faucets, warning that this could delay the completion of the repairs.
With the repairs completed, DWP officials said theyneed to repressurize the system in the area and carry out testing. They said the agency would need to send water samples to a lab and get the results back, which can take about 18 hours, and that this process must be repeated for confirmation to comply with drinking water guidelines.
L.A. City Councilmember John Lee said that, if all goes as planned, once the system is repressurized, water use for “non-consumption purposes” might be possible as early as Monday morning.
“This is a positive step, but I strongly urge customers to wait until LADWP indicates that the system can support usage,” Lee said in a written statement. He added that the notice for residents to boil water for drinking and cooking purposes would remain in place until the DWP verified the water testing results.
While the work was underway, another problem occurred in one area of Granada Hills. DWP workers had installed two lines of hose-like temporary pipe to transport water from the Metropolitan Water District, the region’s water wholesaler, to a city pipe, and on Saturday one of those hoses popped off a connection and sent water shooting into a backyard in Granada Hills.
The DWP shut down that connection point, Collins said, and was looking into why the temporary pipe was dislodged.
Meanwhile, workers are using pumps to route water through multiple connection points into that zone of the city’s system, Collins said.
During the water service outage, DWP has set up five locations where residents can pick up bottled water, shower and do laundry:
- Holleigh Bernson Memorial Park, 20500 Sesnon Blvd., Porter Ranch: bottled water, recycled water distribution, restrooms, showers, mobile laundry units. 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.
- O’Melveny Park, 17300 Sesnon Blvd., Granada Hills: bottled water, recycled water distribution, restrooms. 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.
- Intersection of Tampa Avenue And Sesnon Boulevard on the border of Northridge and Porter Ranch: bottled water and recycled water distribution. 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.
- YMCA, 11336 Corbin St., Porter Ranch: showers, mobile laundry units. 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
- Intersection of Rinaldi Street and Louise Avenue: showers, mobile laundry units, restrooms. 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
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