Los Angeles Department of Water and Power

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.

History

Private operators

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.