Over the weekend, while fire raged in the Angeles National Forest, over in the San Fernando Valley they were inundated with water. A water main built in 1914 broke and flooded Ventura Boulevard in Studio City throughout the weekend. While it reopened on Monday, today a second break on the same water main hit another section of Coldwater Canyon Avenue and produced maybe the ultimate piece of imagery - a fire truck consumed by flood. I don't think the truck was headed to La Cañada, but the inference is made anyway.
You cannot write 1,000 words on our crumbling infrastructure that capture the subject better than this. A state without the revenue to heal itself becomes a state where fire trucks sink in a flood caused by unattended 100 year-old pipes. The layers of meaning just fall into one another. This is the picture of a state that cannot fix itself. |
