Over the weekend, while fire raged in the Angeles National Forest, over in the San Fernando Valley they were inundated with water. A water main built in 1914 broke and flooded Ventura Boulevard in Studio City throughout the weekend. While it reopened on Monday, today a second break on the same water main hit another section of Coldwater Canyon Avenue and produced maybe the ultimate piece of imagery – a fire truck consumed by flood. I don’t think the truck was headed to La Cañada, but the inference is made anyway.
You cannot write 1,000 words on our crumbling infrastructure that capture the subject better than this. A state without the revenue to heal itself becomes a state where fire trucks sink in a flood caused by unattended 100 year-old pipes. The layers of meaning just fall into one another. This is the picture of a state that cannot fix itself.
That’s just Grover Norquist’s toy fire truck drowning in a bathtub.
no idea how bad the damage was that had caused my inconvenience. So glad not to live in LA anymore. I miss the people very much. The living conditions fluctuate wildly, in large part because of breakdowns of one sort or another.
Good thing I know an alternative route, offered here as a public service:
Take Mulholland to Benedict Canyon south to the Century City/West Hollywood area, rather than the 405 South all the way to Wilshire.
it is a state whose government will not fix anything. we may well get to the point where our hands are truly tied, but for now this decay is chosen.