The cause of a ruptured water main last month that spurred subsequent leaks, flooding, at least $1 million in damage, and left 125,000 people under a boil-water notice, remains unknown, officials said Thursday.
In a presentation before the city’s Utilities Commission, Assistant General Manager Tai Tseng with the Long Beach Utilities Department said the main, installed in 1947 and refurbished in 1975, ruptured randomly and without outstanding reason.
“Unfortunately, in these cases, (the) majority of time, there is no definitive cause for these types of random breaks,” he said.
He added that officials are still looking into the root cause ahead of a scheduled Dec. 3 presentation before the Long Beach City Council.
This comes a month after the ruptured water pipe in California Heights sent a million gallons of water gushing into the neighborhood and left residents in three zip codes on a boil-water notice because of the risk of contamination caused by a drop in water pressure after the break.
Officials lifted the state-required order after 177 samples taken in 14 locations found the water safe to drink.
But concerns were raised about the Utilities Department’s slow communication with the public. While the water was ultimately never a threat, the department couldn’t confirm that until the following day, since testing takes a full 24-hour period. And while the pipe ruptured at 11:15 a.m. that day, it wasn’t until 11:19 p.m. that the department sent out its first alert warning of the contamination risk.
At their Oct. 22 meeting, council members shared interactions they had with residents who said in that 12-hour span, they brushed their teeth, drank water and cooked from the tap.
Others complained that notices were not sent to all those who could have been affected. Only residents in ZIP codes 90805, 90807 and parts of 90806 received a notice, while those with a landline — about 50,000 people — were contacted through the Alert Long Beach phone system.
The decision to wait, Tseng said, was out of an “abundance of caution” and only after they determined “there was sufficient data to suggest” a risk.
“It took us about six hours to get enough information to determine whether we felt we had a risk,” he added. “And then, subsequently, we had to execute our emergency notification plan, which is all the work that we have to do internally to make sure that the notification that we issued to the resident is accurate. And that, in itself, takes time.”
Fellow Assistant General Manager Diana Tang added that this secondary data included everything that defined exactly which neighborhoods were affected.
“We wanted to make sure that we were conservative in defining that area and complete,” she said. “We were doing our due diligence to be complete in defining the impacted area based on data and statistics and maps of our pipelines.”
Another time-consuming factor, Tang continued, is the department had to notify “all the parties that should be notified prior to the actual, full-blown notification.” (She did not specify who those parties were.)
Costs and causes of the rupture are still being assessed. There were subsequent leaks along three service lines — Linden Avenue, Tolbert Avenue and Gundry Avenue — that caused minor flooding as well as a second water main break further down from the first on Orange Avenue.
The water pressure rate pushing through that specific system was equivalent to the city’s total demand, Tseng said, strong enough to lift metal piping and unearth surrounding sediment.
“You should have brought your boogie board,” Tseng said of the flooding.
The cost to repave and repair a stretch of Orange Avenue alone “was in excess of one million dollars,” officials said. They added that they could not give an estimate on any of the other work involved.
Despite the incident, Tseng assured that Long Beach has fewer broken pipes than the national average, — four for every 100 miles of pipeline, as opposed to 15 in the same distance, according to the American Water Works Association.
Despite concerns that Long Beach has many pipes that are old and in need of replacement — the second break revealed a 20-inch cast iron pipeline estimated to be nearly a hundred years old — Tseng assured this was “not age driven.”
He added that the broken main and its connected pipeline were not identified as “at-risk” in the department’s most recent Water Distribution Master Plan.
“The city is quite old, and we still have pipes in the ground that have not had any failure problems, that were installed in 1910, over 100 years old.” Tseng said. “We have pipes ranging from 1910 to, you know, all the way up to present. And they vary in material, whether it’s ductile iron, cast iron, asbestos, cement or plastic.”
At the City Council’s request, the city’s Utilities Department General Manager B. Anatole Falagan will come before the dais on Dec. 3 with a report on its handling of the break.
The report should provide a timeline of events, the scope of the damage and an explanation for how the city is meant to handle any future crises.