Two weeks after a water main break occurred on Orange Avenue in Long Beach, causing water, fear and confusion to flood the area, the City still has more questions than answers.
The Long Beach City Council is requesting the City Manager and Utilities Department to craft a report on the City’s water pipe infrastructure, maintenance plan and protocols for future emergencies. The council will review the presentation in roughly 45 days at another meeting.
“From this incident it’s clear that our citywide emergency response system needs to be discussed,” said Councilmember Megan Kerr, whose district was largely impacted and who brought the item forward. “We weren’t able to sufficiently spread the word to everyone who needed to know.”
Anatole Falagán, general manager for the Long Beach Utilities Department, was just one week into his new role as manager when the water main break occurred. He sat at the council meeting and listened to the councilmember’s concerns of confusion among residents and the need for a communication plan.
What We Know
The first water main break occurred around 11:30 a.m. on Oct. 9 at 3502 Orange Ave., causing flooding along the street. The issue was with a 20-inch main water transmission pipeline, according to a social media post from the Utilities Department.
It’s common for one water main break to cause issues with the surrounding pipes, which is exactly what happened along Orange Avenue on Oct. 9 and 10. The break caused water pressure to fall in parts of the 90805, 90807 and 90806 zip codes.
Orange Avenue was closed to cars during this time, between Wardlow Road and E. 36th Street.
According to the California State Water Resources Control Board, a water system pressure loss of less than 5 psi (pounds per square inch) requires a boil water notice. The City claims that the water was never contaminated, and the boil water notice was lifted on the early morning of Oct. 11, after 177 tests were conducted. The City distributed over 70 pallets of bottled water to residents in the impacted zip codes on Oct. 10.
It’s been over two decades since the last time Long Beach had to issue a boil water notice, according to City Manager Tom Modica. A study conducted by Utah State University’s Water Research Laboratory estimated that about 260,000 water main breaks occur in the United States and Canada each year, costing roughly $2.6 billion to remediate.
There have been several water main breaks since the Orange Avenue one, Falagán said, but none to the same extent. In a press conference on Oct. 10, he said the Utilities Department budgets $100 million annually towards infrastructure.
Communication Issues
Hours after the first water main break occurred on Oct. 9, residents began being notified through a variety of methods such as email, Go Long Beach alerts, phone calls and text messages. Internally, councilmembers say they struggled with where to get information and what to tell their concerned residents.
Councilmember Kerr said her office sent out emails to residents notifying them of the situation at 6 a.m. on Oct. 10. These emails however, would have only gone out to residents who signed up for their district email newsletters.
Multiple councilmembers said they didn’t know who to contact to receive updates, making it difficult to explain the situation to residents in their district.
“I was waiting for official notifications to my office around what we could put out, what we could tell residents. A lot of those things were happening, but there wasn’t a lot of communication with my office to help disseminate that information,” Councilmember Joni Ricks-Oddie said.
The main notification system used was the Alert Long Beach messages that went out to 50,000 people in the evening on Oct. 9. This is the city’s emergency notification system that uses emails and/or text messages to notify residents about certain incidents, if they have signed up to receive them. There have been conflicting reports from residents and councilmembers about when these messages went out, with some residents not receiving any text messages until Thursday evening.
Kerr said although her and her husband are both signed up for the alerts, she began receiving messages before he did.
The city also used a location-based system called “We Alert,” but someone would only receive the messages if they were in the areas impacted at the time the blasts went out, much like an Amber Alert.
The Utilities Department began posting on social media about the incident on Oct. 9, acknowledging the reduced water pressure and telling residents to expect brown sediment in their water. Their caption read that this was “naturally occurring and not harmful to human health.”
LB Utilities posted four times on their Instagram page and five times on their X, formerly known as Twitter, page. The boil water notice was shared onto these accounts at almost midnight on Oct. 9. There were several more messages on Oct. 10 from City departments and councilmember offices, via social media and email blasts.
Kerr acknowledged that this leaves out people who don’t have internet access or who are not as active on social media, like older residents. Modica said the City also made 40,000 automated calls to landlines in the area.
“This was a fifth of our city. If this was a disaster, if there was an earthquake that affected the entire region, we know everybody’s going to be using emergency systems. I would like to know that ours is up to the task of alerting as many folks as possible,” Kerr said.
City staff also acknowledged that notifications in languages such as Spanish, Khmer and Tagalog went out even later than English ones.
The report will include a plan for emergency communications relating to utilities and a chain of command on where to get and how to spread information.
What We Don’t Know
The City is still searching for answers as to what caused the main water break, and why it spread so quickly. Councilmember Al Austin requested that the report include “challenges” to the city’s water infrastructures and necessary improvements.
“Many of the workers commented to me that they have never seen this type of activity happen all at once,” Austin said. “I think we need to understand what the causes were … so that we can get ahead of [it] and be proactive.”
Councilmember Daryl Supernaw asked Utilities to clarify why the boil water notice went out since the phrases “out of an abundance of caution” and “state mandate” were both used in official statements.
“To me, those two phrases have a difference and I think we should be very accurate in our communication,” he said.