UCLA’s busted water main is the water cooler talk of today. The 30-foot geyser sent 10 million gallons of water into the streets of Westwood and UCLA’s campus in the course of the 3 hours it took the DWP to shut off the valves. UCLA is the big story of the day, but this is actually the 4th water main break of this month, after ones in Koreatown, Venice and Highland Park.

Could they all be related? We’ll take a deeper look at the region’s antiquated water system and also try to answer the question on many water-conserving angelenos’ minds: just how much water is 10 million gallons? We’ll put that in some perspective.

Guests:

Mike Miller, District Superintendent for DWP

Yazdan Emrani, Vice President / Principal at Hall & Foreman, an engineering and land planning services firm in Valencia, California. As part of the American Society of Civil Engineers, he helped launch the first ever comprehensive infrastructure report card for California

Ellen Hanak, economist with the Public Policy Institute of California and author of the recent report “Paying for Water in California”

Jon Christensen, assistant professor at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA and editor of Boom: A Journal of California