Lopez: In L.A.'s underground, the public servants are 80, 90 and 100. It's tough getting old

In the stifling darkness beneath Los Angeles, the people keeping water flowing through the city’s decaying infrastructure are often 80, 90, or pushing 100 years old. These aren’t veteran engineers reviewing blueprints from air-conditioned offices. They are the corroded cast-iron and clay pipes themselves, laid down when Woodrow Wilson was president, now leaking, cracking, and forcing crews to descend into century-old tunnels that double as time capsules of urban neglect.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power replaces 45 miles of these aging water lines every year. That number sounds impressive until you consider the scale of the problem: thousands more miles of pipe are past their designed lifespan, sprouting leaks that waste millions of gallons while Angelenos are told to conserve during droughts. The underground public servants, as columnist Steve Lopez calls them, have become a subterranean embarrassment for a city that markets itself as a capital of innovation.

Crews navigating these narrow, hazardous passages encounter not just failing infrastructure but literal relics: wooden timbers installed during the Great Depression, rusted valves stamped with manufacturers long out of business, and pipes so brittle that repairs risk triggering larger collapses. The physical toll on human workers is real, but the deeper story is how a modern metropolis has deferred maintenance so thoroughly that its water system now depends on what amounts to archaeological preservation rather than engineered renewal.