LA's no drama water boss

Marcie Edwards, Los Angeles' water boss, gives an audience no sense of the calamitous nature of the drought. But maybe that’s as it should be. The drought is being fought in increments, one lawn and one repaired water pipe at a time. The task doesn’t lend itself to dramatic words.

Edwards, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told a Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum luncheon Wednesday that the solution was reducing landscape watering, fixing and replacing old pipes, increasing storage capacity, recycling water and capturing storm water instead of allowing it to flow into the Pacific.

Mostly, she said, it’s all about infrastructure, not interesting to read about but necessary.

It was interesting to me. I’ve been writing about water since when there was plenty of it—or in some years far more than we could handle. The water bosses of that time thought of expansion. Los Angeles had plenty of water from the Owens Valley, supplemented by allocations from the Metropolitan Water District, which imports water from the Colorado River and Northern California and supplies it to the DWP and many other Southern California water agencies. Everyone thought big.

Now we think small. Los Angeles, Edwards said, has reduced water consumption by 16 percent. “Los Angeles has been trying very hard to cut water use,” she said. Much of the reduction is coming from cutting down water use for lawns, gardens and other landscaping. And, she said, there is “an increased focus on water pipe breaks.”

She made an interesting point about the difficulties of fixing things. As Edwards described it, the Department of Water Power is having trouble finding people with the craft skills and teamwork abilities needed to respond to emergencies, such as a big water pipe break. City hiring rules and union contracts also slow the process. And other city rules make it difficult to hire outside contractors to do the work.

I guess I was hoping for a stirring call to action from the water boss, but that’s probably inappropriate for someone who will be judged, in the long run, by how many pipes she fixes and how much water she recycles.