As temperatures rise, flood threat grows along Los Angeles Aqueduct
More than a month after heavy storms eroded a section of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, work crews are still scrambling to complete repairs and shore up flood defenses in the face of a weeklong heat wave that threatens to trigger widespread snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada.
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Historic snowpack levels in the Eastern Sierra are expected to melt into runoff that is 225% of normal, which translates to about 326 billion gallons of water that will need to be managed, DWP officials said.
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The DWP has already begun emptying reservoirs to create more storage space for the roughly 130 billion gallons of water expected to make its way to Los Angeles this spring and summer via the aqueduct—potentially enough to meet 80% of L.A.'s annual demand.
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Those releases, however, transformed the alkaline lake bed into a churning floodplain of corrosive flows that battered diversion systems, chewed through 18 miles of roads and berms, and encroached on pumping stations and high-voltage electrical infrastructure that would take millions of dollars and several years to replace, officials said.
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