Archive: Infrastructure

An estimated 188,000 people fled areas downstream from Lake Oroville after a hole was spotted Sunday in the giant dam's emergency spillway. LA swift-water rescue teams are headed north.

Two views of the river: Sunday's rain-swollen racetrack and the big concrete ditch we usually see.

The mega airport is such a vital and vulnerable piece of our infrastructure that it employs two anti-terrorism experts with top-secret clearances.

Steve Greenberg's cartoon on the Central Coast plant.

Lost LA's Nathan Masters curates a look at the urban carnage wrought by construction of the Hollywood Freeway in the 1950s.

"I’m hurting and I’m sad and mad...I’m beginning to feel the city isn’t good for me anymore," Gigi Graciette vents.

The sidewalk on Prosser Avenue in Rancho Park has been a trip-and-fall waiting to happen since at least 2012. We have the pictures.

Several state agencies are ordered to take a role in getting SoCal Gas to stop the methane venting above Aliso Canyon.

Elevated bacteria counts plus the discovery of hypodermic needles and tampon applicators are tied to Hyperion's switch this week to a pipe dumping treated sewage just a mile offshore.

Now everyone knows that a generation of Los Angeles officials has fumbled the infrastructure ball and that Garcetti and the City Council don't yet have a workable answer.

This weekend's pouring of the concrete base for the Wilshire Grand Hotel turned into a fascinating dance of engineering, street-level logistics and photo ops. This piece by David Leonard is our favorite.

Streets were closed all around Wilshire and Figueroa on Saturday and early Sunday to make way for a big fleet of trucks pouring concrete for the base of the new Wilshire Grand hotel, being built by Korean interests as the highest skyscraper on the West Coast.

Since the deadly Sylmar earthquake in 1971 it has been recognized that the flood control dams in the San Gabriels were not built sufficiently strong to hold up if a severe regional quake hit while the dams retained a full load of water.

Rather than require ticked-off viewers to make claims and complete a bunch of paperwork, TWC will give all Southern California customers a gift to make up for losing the Super Bowl feed on Sunday.

Viewers across Southern California lost the game in the second quarter for about an hour. Time Warner Cable noted helpfully that the feed was still available if you were an HD customer.

New Year's Day is one of the holidays that pushes LA trash collection back one day — service returns to normal next week. Plus some tips on recycling your Christmas tree.

For a month starting on March 23, the main canyon road connecting the Valley with Beverly Hills will be closed during the day. Coldwater Canyon Avenue needs to be dug up to replace the main water line installed during the William Mulholland era with a new trunk line.

The recycling of Christmas trees in Los Angeles County is actually kind of complicated. Some will be buried in landfills, but still be considered recycled. And it makes sense.

Photos: The California Aqueduct near Littlerock, moving Northern California water across the Mojave Desert on Wednesday afternoon.

A reader emails to say he has been picking up a "strange odor" in the water in his neighborhood above the Silver Lake reservoir. He notes that we've posted about odors in the water before and asks: "Any other reports these days?"

I love stories about infrastructure: sewers, pipelines, trash and the like. The subject of SoCal investigative author Edward Humes' new book warms my wonkish heart — "Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash" — and has some good LA angles.

The DWP, which is scrambling to repair a flurry of water main breaks it blames on work at the distant Lower Franklin Canyon reservoir, says that West 3rd Street will remain closed between Fairfax Avenue and Ogden Drive until 7 p.m.

A little rain finished off the job in San Pedro's White Point neighborhood, apparently.

Concrete in the 1933 bridge connecting Downtown with the Eastside is rotting from the inside and the structure is slated for replacement.

Don't plan to drive between Big Sur and Carmel or Monterey any time soon.

Heal the Bay president Mark Gold isn't a fan of the Department of Water and Power reform measures that may appear on the March ballot in Los Angeles.

Illogical as it sounds, a panel of experts convened by the city has concluded that last year's siege of water main breaks was triggered by the DWP's Monday-Thursday watering restrictions creating higher pressures on aging pipes.

Over the new few months, the architectural discussion website mammoth will be hosting an online discussion of a forthcoming book, "The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles," as an "experiment in the cooperative reading and discussion of a text."

Dramatic geyser is blowing higher than the rooftops on Van Nuys Boulevard near Sherman Way. Screen cap is from CBS 2. * Noon update: DWP says the main, which broke...

There's too much chlorine smell in the L.A. tap water lately, blogs Atwater Village Newbie. He has collected Twitter reports from others as well. OK, maybe it's not the mysterious...

More water main breaks, Dick Cook's bad day, John Edwards' bad decision and more in Morning Buzz, tucked below the fold. Don't forget to check out Mark Lacter at LA...

It's Wednesday and what? No new outbursts to report? Emotional ones, no. But two more water mains burst in the San Fernando Valley overnight. And what do water officials have...

Moving on up: Villaraigosa press secretary Matt Szabo becomes deputy chief of staff. One of his first priorities will be to tackle the city's worsening financial situation. (LAT) Warhol art...

While city crews try to repair that giant hole where a water trunk line failed on Coldwater Canyon Avenue over the weekend, another water main break has claimed a fire...

Veronique de Turenne drops off a load, posts some pictures at Here in Malibu: "Kind of freaks me out, but it's also fascinating, this other world where tons of junk...

Steve Lopez visits in today's column with Dorothy Green, the longtime water activist and founder of Heal the Bay who is in hospice care for metastasized cancer. She is 79,...

Every bed at the new Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center will be filled from the day it opens this fall, according to an independent report requested by the Board of...

Stories planted this morning in the Times, Daily News and Wall Street Journal unveil Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's billion-dollar agenda to re-invent Los Angeles' relationship to water. Villaraigosa and DWP chief...

Louis Sahagun reports for the Times that "thousands of dockworkers at all 29 West Coast ports, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, took the day off work today in what...

As a reporter, I liked to write about L.A's infrastructure — freeways, water, refuse. I always thought there was a book in the history of the Los Angeles sewer system,...

Donna Barstow takes some pics and blogs her thoughts about the Department of Water and Power....

The DWP has decided to dump all the water in Silver Lake and the Elysian reservoir because of unusually high traces of the carcinogen bromate, which formed in the water...

Examining a plan to inject the city's daily mountain of sludge into the ground under Terminal Island, CityWatch's Marc Haefele revisits past schemes to dispose of the treated (but still...

Dockweiler State Beach and the northern half of Manhattan Beach — from Ballona Creek south to the Manhattan Beach Pier — will be posted with closed signs Tuesday though Thursday,...