Officials at Grape Street Elementary School in South Los Angeles were continuing to distribute bottled water on campus as city crews conduct tests at five area schools in response to complaints that arose last week about murky water coming out of taps and fountains, district officials said Wednesday.
According to Robert Laughton, director of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety, the Department of Water and Power is testing water at Compton, Lovelia Flournoy, Grape Street, Florence Griffith Joyner and 96th Street elementary schools, but he insisted there are no current complaints about the quality of water.
“However, on Friday, April 29, OEHS did investigate complaints of discolored water at Joyner, Flournoy, Grape and 96th Street elementary schools,” he said. “Test results indicated the water was adequately chlorinated, and no bacteria were detected. Some schools did use bottled water on that day while awaiting the test results.”
Laughton said district maintenance officials flushed out plumbing lines at the schools in hopes of clearing any debris from the lines.
DWP officials said Tuesday they plan to flush out water lines throughout South Los Angeles, where residents have also complained about cloudy water.
A South Los Angeles activist displayed bottles of brown-colored water at Tuesday’s Los Angeles City Council meeting, saying they were provided by residents who said the samples came from their taps. Tim Watkins of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee said residents are talking about installing water filtration systems.
“I think that’s an inappropriate response to a problem that should be resolved from a municipal standpoint,” Watkins told the council.
DWP Water Operations Manager Marty Adams told the council that LAUSD officials notified them last week about the cloudy water. Adams said DWP officials did not find any cloudiness in the water during a test on Friday, but that cloudy water occurs intermittently.
He said despite the unappealing look of the water, it is safe to drink.
Adams told the council the “first indication” of problems with cloudy water came in February when a fire hydrant in the area was knocked down, causing high water flows that may have stirred up sediment in the pipe and prompted “quite a few calls,” Adams said.
DWP officials are unsure of the exact source of the sediment and will be investigating as they move forward with the pipe-flushing, which is expected to be done over the next month or longer, Adams said.
He also said most of the pipes in South Los Angeles were “re-plumbed” in the 1980s and 1990s and are newer than those in other parts of the city.
But because the pipes do “apparently have a lot of sediment that needs to get out,” the DWP will be doing “an aggressive flushing program,” he said.
South Los Angeles residents will be notified with door hangers before their block is being flushed, because the process will likely lead to cloudy water, Adams said.
South Los Angeles’ issues with cloudy water appear to be unrelated to a January chlorine pump malfunction at a water treatment plant. The pump failure allowed water that had not been fully disinfected to flow into the drinking water supply of the South Los Angeles neighborhoods of Green Meadows and Watts.
The failure occurred at the 99th Street Wells Water Treatment Facility at about 9 p.m. Jan. 15, but an automated alarm wasn’t noticed by a plant operator at a remote control site until later, leading to a delay in fixing the problem. The pump failure lasted until 3 the next morning, which meant water that had not been chlorinated was distributed to customers for about six hours.
DWP officials also did not formally notify the public of the malfunction until April 22, and the notification only occurred because the incident was cited as a “technical violation” by the State Water Resources Control Board Division of Drinking Water.
The state cited the DWP because repairs must be done within four hours, and it took six hours instead, DWP officials said.
DWP officials noted the automated alarm went off in the midst of a shift change, and the employee coming on duty failed to notice the alert.
Adams told the City Council that DWP management, those who are “up the chain,” were not informed of the pump failure, and only discovered it about a month later while conducting a regular audit of water quality.
— Wire reports