California Water News Daily Your Source For Water News in California
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) held a joint open house with the City of Burbank last week at an active LADWP construction site so area businesses and residents could learn about the water infrastructure project taking place in their community.
The River Supply Conduit 7 (RSC7) project is being staged for the next two years in Burbank’s Johnny Carson Park South to avoid construction work being performed on Riverside Drive and impacting traffic.
Elected officials from Burbank and the LADWP project team were on hand at the construction site to provide visitors an up-close-and-personal glimpse at the project which currently features a large, 63-foot deep pit that will serve as the starting point of this large-scale, underground tunneling and pipe installation project.
The centerpiece of this pipe replacement project is “Luciana” a 200-ton, 13-foot wide tunnel boring machine (TBM) transported here from Schwanau, Germany. “Luciana” has the capability of tunneling a distance of 60 feet in over a 24-hour period. Over the course of the next two years, “Luciana” will create a 13,000-foot long tunnel where a new 78-inch welded steel trunk line will be installed.
Pipes that are 20 inches or greater in diameter are known as trunk lines. These trunk lines transport large amounts of water throughout the LADWP service area. The RSC7 project will be replacing pipes that were installed in the 1940s and are approaching the end of their typical lifespan.
Construction on RSC7 is expected to be completed by April 2022. The major tunneling portion of RSC7 will begin next month after the TBM is lowered into the pit at the project site. That tunneling phase is expected to be completed by September 2021.
