915films
By 915Films
Follow-up to the Thursday’s box truck vs hydrant hit-and-run on S. La Cumbre Lane.
The city repaired the hydrant and had neighborhood water, including 5-Points Shopping Center, back online after the expected few hours of work. However, they left a 4” pipe sticking out of the ground with water pouring into the street.
Seeing the water still flowing Friday morning, I tried navigating the City’s voicemail maze on a City wide day-off day.
I ended up contacting our councilman. This triggered a call from the water district explaining it. He said they are waiting for a part that won’t be here until Monday. Work for the repair will not start until Monday 11:00 PM as they need to wait until restaurants and other business that will be affected by an interruption in the water supply are close. That means that this water will be flowing down the drain non-stop for 3 1/2 days.
Really making me feel happy about how I save my last rinse water (dishes) and bucket it out onto my plants, a gallon at a time.
I’m sorry but what the hell? They don’t have caps of the appropriate size on hand, or available within a day’s drive radius? Nah, that’s absurd, someone took the easy way out. Shame. Happy Earth Day……
With all the money in taxes we pay for public works. They should have a genie that pops out and plugs the water pipe. What a bunch of BS can’t get the part till Monday with the way they spend money they should have ten spare parts of every sort down at the city yard or county yard.
Sounds like they are aware of the problem, they have a plan to fix it as soon as possible, and you got all worked up over nothing.
5 days to fix a flowing, not leaking but FLOWING, pipe is not “as soon as possible”. We are 2 hours from LA, you can’t possibly tell me they couldn’t have gotten a temporary part within 5 days. It’s not the end of the world obviously, but it IS lazy and embarrassing.
Fire hydrants are supposed to have a dedicated isolation shut off valve in order to shut off just the damaged hydrant. This is usually in the street directly in front of the hydrant.
This “leak” tells me that perhaps the dedicated shut off may be defective or be blocked semi-open. Seems odd they don’t keep replacements of valves of all common sizes on hand at all times though
A total waste because a bureaucratic agency wasn’t properly prepared. Oh well, not a problem since the taxpayers can cover the bill…
This is actually the perfect time to have this problem. Lake Cachuma is full and excess water is spilling out of it. We have more water than we can store, so this waste is of no co sequence. And more rain is coming this week. The real waste is our failure to do ncreaee the capacity of cachuma. We could have saved a vast amount of additional water, but too many people had become convinced it would never rain enough to fill the lake again.
CHIP OF SB The way to increase the capacity of Cachuma would be to dredge out the silt that has built up in it over the decades. Because that isn’t being done it is really impossible to know the current capacity of this vital resource.
You’re undoubtedly unaware of this, but there is currently no such thing as a reliable water source, nor will there ever be.
The history of the Cachuma Dam includes renaming it Bradbury Dam in the 1970s, but there are no indications that the capacity was increased.
CHIP – not sure it was filled “twice over.” Why would we increase capacity and potentially flood the campgrounds and nearby 154? There are parts of that road that pretty close to current lake level. The lake does not spill over often enough to raise the level. What would be the point?
Creating the lake in the first place was inconvenient because it flooded existing roads and infrastructure. The lake loses a little capacity every year, and it lost a lot of capacity with the heavy rains that occurred this year. Something will need to be done sooner or later in order to maintain sufficient capacity to provide a reliable water supply. Or we could keep putting it off until it becomes a crisis.
Chip’s point, one of his favorites, is to spread FUD about anthropogenic global warming. He has no expertise in hydrography, nor in almost any subject on which he pontificates. His forte is regurgitating right-wing social media disinformation.
People who think it would be easy to dredge sediment out of Cachuma have no clue about the difficulty and logistics that would be involved in such an undertaking at a level that would make any difference to out water supply.
Back in the 70s the capacity was increased by raising the elevation of the reservoir at the dam. This could be a more cost effective option. The capacity of the lake is significantly lower after all the sediment that flowed in during the storms this winter. Time to look at options to increase capacity now that we have seen proof that our “permanent drought” also includes enough rain to fill cachuma twice over.