Water Main Breaks Due to Conservation?

Experts suspect that the alarming series of water main bursts ( Canoga Park , Winnetka , Melrose Ave. , Studio City ) over the last few days may be due to the city's new water rationing, it was reported this weekend.

"You made a change in operations...and now you get an anomalous number of failures. To me that is an 'ah hah' moment," Richard Little, director of the Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy at USC, told the Los Angeles Times .

The culprit could be the city's recently imposed rule that sprinklers may only be used on Mondays and Thursdays . If more water flows through the system on those days, when people are watering their lawns, and flow drops on other days, it could put added stress on already aging pipes.

Jean-Pierre Bardet, chair of USC's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, told The Times that he agreed that water rationing should be thoroughly investigated, noting that the system's age makes it susceptible to problems.

Bardet is informally consulting with DWP officials who are investigating the rationing.

City engineers are trying to find the cause of the water main bursts by testing soil samples and pieces of pipe and performing statistical analysis of each break.

The Department of Water of Power has recorded 34 "major blowouts," in its water system in which streets were flooded and pavement buckled since Sept. 1, the Los Angeles Times reported.

By comparison, there were 21 in all of September 2008, 17 in September 2007 and 13 in September 2006, according to The Times.