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Megacities Center to Study Water Main Breaks

By Eric Mankin on October 16, 2009 9:20 AM

  • Megacities Center to Study Water Main Breaks
  • USC Viterbi professor Jean-Pierre Bardet

A recent rash of well-publicized breaks in Southern California water mains disrupted commutes and destroyed streets. Now, USC Viterbi School of Engineering professor Jean-Pierre Bardet, director of the USC Center on Megacities, will lead an effort to find causes.

The action came after a Sept. 23 meeting of the City of Los Angeles subcommittee on energy and the environment, led by councilwoman Jan Perry, heard Department of Water and Power testimony and recommended an analysis of the factors affecting pipeline breaks to be performed by independent experts.

Bardet, the chair of USC Viterbi’s Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will be performing this analysis, working with researchers at Cornell University and coordinating with a group at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“We will be casting a very wide net,” Bardet promised.

According to Bardet, the research agenda includes meetings with Water and Power personnel, visits to sites of water main breaks, statistical study of water system characteristics (pipe diameter, thickness, age and other parameters) and cross-system comparisons of Water and Power’s experience with that of other water suppliers in large urban areas, including Northern California, Portland, San Diego, Washington, D. C., and New York.

Bardet and others raised the possibility during the initial reportage of the breaks that strains, caused by limiting lawn watering to two days a week, may have played a role in the breakages.

His group will study this possibility, but he emphasized that it is only a possibility, noting that breaks took place in other Southern California systems that did not impose watering restrictions.

“We are not in any way prejudging the issue,” he said. “We are finding facts, not assuming them.”

Bardet’s research will use a computer simulation/decision support system created by Cornell to model and analyze stresses on the pipe network.

“We believe we have the tools to both better understand what is going on and to find effective ways to prevent recurrence of these unfortunate incidents,” Bardet said.

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