Via de las Olas Sewer Project Is Completed

A major bulkhead and sewer realignment project, which began two years ago on the Via de Las Olas bluffs between Lombard Avenue and Friends Street, has been completed. On Tuesday, foreman Manuel Sanchez of the Clarke Contracting Company in Lawndale was overseeing the final stages, which included abandoning the old storm drain and sewers by filling them with cement. The project originated in early 2005 after winter storms supersaturated the soil under Via de las Olas and caused the asphalt to buckle. The bluffs along Via have a history of geological instability, most notably the ‘killer slide’ in 1958 that buried Pacific Coast Highway and destroyed part of Via de las Olas, which was eventually rebuilt with a wooden bulkhead supporting the roadway. In 2005, Congressman Henry Waxman directed $2.6 million of Federal Emergency Management Administration funds toward repairing the street and the state and city agreed to split the remaining costs of the estimated $3.5-million project. The new bulkhead is now mostly buried underground and consists of 61 individual 59-foot steel beams that were placed between 15251 and 15205 Via de las Olas. The bulkhead was finished early this year, but the sewer line running along Via (into a pipeline below the bluffs), kept breaking because of the unstable ground. ‘Movement of the landslide has resulted in repeated emergency maintenance repairs to piping,’ Los Angeles Public Works spokeswoman Lauren Skinner told the Palisadian-Post last December. New sewer and storm-drain lines were laid and redirected to pipes that drain into existing lines in Potrero Canyon. To accommodate the pipes, a 17- by 20-ft. wide hole, 35 feet deep was dug at the top of the bluffs on Friends Street overlooking the canyon. The sewer line connects with another line that eventually feeds into the Hyperion treatment plant in Playa del Rey. The stormwater drain connects with another pipe that goes into the ocean. ‘The pit has been filled in and there are two maintenance hole covers,’ said Sanchez, who laughed as he added, ‘They used to be called manhole covers.’ In last December’s Post story, the project had an estimated completion time of nine months, but the actual work took about five months.