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

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Set us as preferred Sometimes the joints get rusty.Sometimes rising pressure stresses arteries.Sometimes there’s a bit of leakage.It’s tough getting old.But that’s the reality for much of the underground network of pipes that deliver more than 400 million gallons of water daily to customers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.We don’t give it much thought until there’s a major water line break, as there was early on the morning of July 17 under Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.A 36-inch artery blew like a ruptured aorta, creating a sinkhole and sending 17 million gallons of water rushing through the streets.We learned from DWP in the early post-mortem that the pipe in question had been on duty for more than a century — 110 years, to be exact.

California When 17 million gallons of water poured out of a broken water main under Sunset Boulevard into downhill neighborhoods in West Hollywood, family businesses and residents’ cars and personal items were in the flood zone.As someone who writes now and again about aging, I’ve been giving this some thought.We think of Los Angeles as a relatively young city, but out of sight and under our feet there lies a massive community of unsung senior citizens whose work is essential to our survival.Through drought and earthquake, and from horse-drawn wagons to driverless cars, they have delivered.President Woodrow Wilson was re-elected the year that pipe was laid, and the Germans attacked the French in the World War I Battle of Verdun, with the death toll topping 700,000.In all the time since, the water flowed through that line under the many incarnations of the Sunset Strip, feeding smaller pipes that quenched a growing metropolis that expanded from about 500,000 people to 4 million.Last month, I walked with friends from Book Soup one evening to get a drink at Di...