You’ve no doubt heard it before: "L.A.’s water is terrible."
Usually, it’s a transplant throwing the shade, complaining that the water in their [insert home city] is "so much cleaner."
Well, now there’s a little science to throw back at all the L.A. water haters: tap water in Los Angeles is just as clean and healthy — if not better—than bottled water, or filtered water, says the LADWP.
The department’s annual Drinking Water Quality report has been released, detailing the city’s tap water.
What’s more, at half a cent per gallon, it’s a whole lot cheaper, too.
The improved taste and quality of our fair city’s drinking water is a result of a change in how we treat it.
Let’s back up: this is not to say all of Los Angeles’ water is zapped by UV light, or currently goes un-chlorinated or un-ammoniated.
We can say, however, that a second UV light treatment plant will be opening up in Granada Hills by 2020, further changing the ratio.
"LADWP’s major efforts to comply with these regulations include addressing its three remaining open reservoirs, enhancing the city’s water supply disinfection system with UV treatment, and changing the distribution system disinfectant from chlorine to chloramine."
Both chlorine and chloramine are approved disinfectants for use in drinking water by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the California Department of Health."

The drought is over, but now L.A. is being swarmed by bugs.
Normally, the office gets about 25 phone calls a day; lately, it’s been around 80.
“They’re getting frustrated and maybe a little freaked out seeing so many insects around their home.” The majority of calls have been about two insects in particular: crane flies and fungus gnats.
Crane flies are sometimes called mosquito hawks or mosquito eaters.
The little black bugs that look like fruit flies are most likely fungus gnats, Sun said.
Though fruit flies and gnats aren’t closely related scientifically — flies are of the family Drosophilidae, gnats are Sciaridae — both are small, winged, black and irritating to find flying around your house.
Crane flies also flourish in damp conditions.
Sun said the best way to prevent fungus gnats is to make sure your yard is cleared of debris or leaves, so that the ground can dry quickly after it rains.
Both crane flies and fungus gnats are seasonal “nuisance insects,” according to Sun: They don’t spread diseases, and as we move closer to summer, you should be seeing a lot less of them.
4:45 p.m.: This article was updated with information about phone calls that the Greater L.A. County Vector Control District has received.

Essential California: Gov.
Jerry Brown made official Friday: The long California drought is over.
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Huge snowpack, blooming desert mark retreat of California drought.
In its latest snow survey completed Thursday, the department found the snowpack for the entire Sierra Nevada was at 164% of average for this time of year.
We have very dry years followed by extremely wet years.” The snow was so deep this year at around 9,000 feet in the central Sierras that a CNN crew was not able to return to the spot they reached two years ago.
"Except for the flagpole and the antenna, you would not know that there is a building there," said Gehrke, according to KTLA.
The governor later ordered residents to sharply curtail their use of water at home.
As hundreds of domestic wells ran dry, many people in rural farming communities and some Californians elsewhere had to drink bottled water and bathe from buckets.
One delightful sign of the retreating drought is a tourist boom in some desert towns from a rare "super bloom" of flowers.
On the downside, the huge snow buildup prompted Los Angeles Major Eric Garcetti last week to declare a state of emergency for the region over concerns of that the melting in the eastern Sierra Nevada would threaten homes in rural areas of Owens Valley hundreds of miles north of the city.
The flood issue is frequently a tense one for Los Angeles, which surreptitiously bought rights to water in the valley and channeled it south more than a century ago.
The emergency declaration cleared the way for the Department of Water and Power to spend up to $50 million to respond to any damage to public health and safety and to protect infrastructure and the environment.

Finally, Severe Drought Gets the Boot From All of LA, Ventura, Santa Barbara Counties.
California’s History of Dry Spells in Photos California Department of Water Resources Conditions have improved in a small swath of Southern California that was one of the last areas of severe drought still standing during a wet winter for the record books.
Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles counties are no longer under severe drought, according to this week’s U.S. Drought Monitor report.
Recent rainfall improved the outlook for groundwater in the region, accouting for the improvement, the Monitor report said.
Only 1 percent of California, a small portion in the extreme southeast corner of Imperial County, remains in severe drought this week.
This season’s record rainfall has knocked out drought in 92 percent of California.
In early March 2016, 97 percent of the state was in some type of drought.
California is in the middle of one of its wettest winters in decades, but remains under a drought emergency.
Gov.
Jerry Brown is expected to review the drought declaration sometime after the rain ends.

Does LA have a shortage of water or imagination?.
Tim Smith’s ever helpful "notes on sustainable water resources" contained this tidbit: Bureau of Reclamation’s Los Angeles Basin Study looks at the changing demographics, climate change and competing interests for available water supplies and identifies options to meet the water needs of the Los Angeles area into the future.
The study [pdf] found that there is a potential water supply deficit for the region of approximately 160,000 acre-feet-per year by 2035 and 440,000 acre-feet-per-year or 25-percent less water than the region is projected to need in 2095.
I’m always curious about these "needs" and "deficits", so I skimmed through the study, which uses "low, medium and high (business as usual)" projections for future demands that are 63 gallons/capita/day (gcd), 99 gcd and 136 gcd, respectively (page 34).
Translated in to liters/capita/day (LCD), you get 240, 376 and 517 LCD, respectively.
Is this reasonable?
Not when you consider that consumption is about 100 LCD in Amsterdam and 160 LCD in Australia’s hot, dry cities.
Bottom Line: Los Angelenos can easily avoid water deficits and shortages by reducing their demands, i.e., lawns.
How do you get them to do that?
Raise prices.