LOS ANGELES — The storms that rolled through last month left the usual map behind them: the same handful of Hollywood intersections turned to shallow lakes, the same underpasses closed for a few hours, the same photographs of a stalled car nose-down in brown water. This year the pictures have turned into a push at City Hall to clean the drains before the next storm arrives.
At issue are catch basins — the curbside grates that funnel street runoff into the storm system — and how often the city clears the leaves, trash and sediment that clog them. The Bureau of Sanitation runs cleaning crews on a rotation, but council members representing flood-prone districts say the rotation has fallen behind in the neighborhoods that need it most.
“We know exactly where it floods. It’s not a mystery, it’s the same five corners every winter,” said Councilmember Alicia Rendón, whose district includes several of them. “If we know where the water pools, we can clean those basins first and clean them more often. What we can’t do is act surprised in January every single year.”
Rendón has asked the bureau for a map of the basins that back up most reliably and a schedule to clear them ahead of forecast storms rather than after. Department officials say they support the idea in principle and note the obstacle is the same one behind most city complaints: crews and money. The cleaning fleet is finite, the basin count runs to the tens of thousands citywide, and a wet week can undo a month of work in an afternoon.
For residents at the low points, the argument is less abstract. Signourney Athitakis, who runs a ground-floor unit near one of the intersections that floods, has kept sandbags by her door for three winters.
“I stopped waiting for the city and started stacking bags myself,” she said. “Every storm I sweep the leaves off the grate on my own corner because if I don’t, the water comes up the step. I pay taxes for that grate. I’d rather not also be its janitor.”
The debate folds into a larger one the council has circled for years: whether to keep patching the drainage system storm by storm or to invest in the far costlier work of upgrading it, capturing more runoff and easing the strain on the oldest lines. That conversation tends to arrive with the rain and leave with the sun, and members conceded Tuesday that it may do so again.
For now, the immediate request is modest and cheap by City Hall standards — a targeted cleaning schedule and a promise to hit the worst corners first. The bureau said it would report back with a plan within a month. Whether the crews reach the basins before the next atmospheric river reaches the coast, several members acknowledged, is a race the calendar usually wins.