The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had six names changes since it was established in 1902.
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, often
polluted ditches, was supplying water for agricultural production but was not suited to provide 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." The Bureau first offered municipal electricity in 1917 when their Power Plant No. 1, a
hydroelectric power plant located in
San Francisquito Canyon powered by the
Los Angeles Aqueduct, began generating electricity. It ultimately produced 70.5
megawatts and is still in operation, producing enough electricity for 37,500 Los Angeles homes. Three years later, in 1920, Power Plant No. 2 was added, but destroyed when the
St. Francis Dam failed. However, the plant was completely rebuilt and back in service by November 1928. It remains in operation today, having the capacity to generate 18 megawatts. On March 12, 1928, the
St. Francis Dam, built and operated by the LADWP,
collapsed catastrophically. The disaster was the second-greatest loss of life in California's history, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. The ensuing flood caused devastation to present-day Valencia, Newhall and the cities in the Santa Clara River Valley, taking the lives of some 425 people. The high death toll was due, in part, to confusion and mis-communication by and between employees of both the LADWP and Southern California Edison, who also had facilities and operations in the area. The confusion led to a lack of prompt warnings being sent to the downriver communities. Those cities included Piru,
Fillmore,
Santa Paula, and
San Buenaventura. Mulholland assumed full responsibility for the disaster and retired the following year. The LADWP played a role in the development of
Hoover Dam and bringing its energy to Los Angeles. The LADWP continued to operate the Hoover Dam electrical facility alongside
Southern California Edison until 1987.
Modern history On January 17, 1994, the city of Los Angeles experienced its one and only total system black-out as a result of the
Northridge earthquake. Much of the power was restored within a few hours. In September 2005, a DWP worker accidentally cut power lines that caused over half of Los Angeles to be without power for one and one-half hours. On October 10, 2011, the LADWP, along with the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Cleantech Alliance, founded the
LA Cleantech Incubator. In October 2022, LADWP lost a lawsuit against the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District for failure to control dust on Owens Lake near sensitive sacred tribal land claiming that they were not responsible for the pollution.
Criticism over excessive overtime and payroll cost The LADWP has been criticized for allowing excessive overtime. In 2018, 306 of its workers took home more than $100,000 in overtime pay, while the agency paid $250 million for overtime, a new high for the agency. The most egregious example of this is a security worker who was paid $314,000 in overtime, on a listed base pay of $25,000, along with three peers who were paid more than $200,000 overtime each. (The nationwide median wage for security officers was $28,500 in 2018.) One policy which enables these large overtime payouts is a provision in the union contracts which requires a normal shift worked after more than one hour of overtime to be paid at double time, with that overtime not based on working time more than 40 hours in a week but on working time beyond a "normal" shift. A separate study found that LADWP's yearly payroll expense per customer was $490, significantly higher than the nationwide median for large utilities of $280 per customer. ==Power system==