Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
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| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | Water: 1902 Electric: 1916 |
| Preceding agency |
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| Type | Water Infrastructure |
| Headquarters | John Ferraro Building 111 North Hope Street Los Angeles, California 34°03′29″N 118°14′58″W / 34.0580°N 118.2495°WCoordinates: 34°03′29″N 118°14′58″W / 34.0580°N 118.2495°W |
| Employees | 8,611 employees |
| Annual budget | US828 million (fy2010) |
| Agency executives |
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| Website | www.ladwp.com |
| Footnotes | |
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the largest municipal utility in the United States, serving over four million residents. It was founded in 1902 to supply water to residents and businesses in Los Angeles and surrounding communities. In 1917, it started to deliver electricity. It has been involved in a number of controversies and media portrayals over the years, including the 1928 St. Francis Dam failure and the books Water and Power and Cadillac Desert.
LADWP can currently deliver a maximum of 7,200 megawatts of power and, in each year, 200 billion US gallons (760 million cubic meters) of water.
By the middle of the 19th century, Los Angeles's rapid population growth magnified problems with the city’s water distribution system. At that time a system of open ditches, often polluted, was reasonably effective at supplying water to agriculture but was not suited to providing water to homes. In 1853, the city council rejected as "excessive" a closed-pipe system that would serve homes directly. As a solution, the city allowed "water carriers with jugs and horse-drawn wagons…to serve the city’s domestic [water] needs." It took until 1857 for the council to realize that the system needed to be updated, which led them to grant William G. Dryden franchise rights to provide homes with water through a system of underground water mains. The initial system served only a few homes using an unreliable network of wooden pipes. In December 1861, heavy rains destroyed the system and Dryden gave up his franchise. The city attempted contracting out water distribution rights to others, but none of the systems that resulted from these contracts was successful.
The city’s previous unsuccessful attempts to allow others to develop a water system on its behalf prompted the city council to relinquish its rights to the water in the Los Angeles River in 1868, which benefited John S. Griffen, Solomon Lazard, and Prudent Beaudry, three already successful businessmen. This change was at the expense of the city of Los Angeles, which could no longer benefit from their municipal water distribution business. The three men created the Los Angeles City Water Company, which violated many of the provisions of its lease on the Los Angeles River, including secretly tunneling under the river to extract 150 times as much water as the lease allowed. As a result, as the end of the lease drew near in the mid-1890s, popular support began to build for a return to complete municipal control of the local water supply.
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