A Van, a 1938 Pipe, and a Hole in Los Feliz

A Van, a 1938 Pipe, and a Hole in Los Feliz

A residential street opened up just before noon

Late Wednesday morning, the pavement on the 1900 block of North Normandie Avenue in Los Feliz simply gave way. A parked Spectrum cable service van slid nose-first into the hole, and water from a ruptured main poured in behind it. Aerial footage from KTLA, ABC7 and CBS Los Angeles showed the white van half-submerged in a water-filled crater at the corner of Normandie and Franklin avenues — a residential corner, not a freeway or a construction site.

The break was logged at 11:10 a.m.

Pamela Workman, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the break was reported at 11:10 a.m. on a main about 8 inches in diameter, a neighborhood distribution pipe rather than a trunk line. According to LADWP, the pipe was installed in 1938. The cause is still under investigation, and the utility has not published the dimensions of the sinkhole.

Water bubbled up through the asphalt

Resident video and helicopter feeds showed water gushing from beneath the roadway while the van kept sinking, its front wheels in the hole and its windshield wipers still moving. KTLA reported that authorities warned the vehicle could be swallowed entirely at any moment. The flow ran down Normandie Avenue but did not appear to be entering nearby homes.

The technician was out of the van and uninjured

Spectrum spokesman Dennis Johnson said the company's technician had been working in the area when the hole opened. "Our technician was working in the area when the sinkhole opened this morning. The technician is fine," he said, adding that the van would be retrieved once officials declared the site safe. No injuries were reported.

31 customers lost water; one block shut in every direction

Firefighters and LADWP crews closed Normandie Avenue from Franklin Avenue to De Mille Drive and cordoned off roughly a block in each direction while they shut off the main. LADWP put the number of affected water customers at 31; the Los Angeles Times described it as about 30. By 5 p.m. Wednesday, a DWP spokesperson said the van had been removed from the sinkhole and crews were working to finish repairs, with no estimate yet for restoring service or reopening the roadway.

It lands on a city already arguing about its pipes

The Los Feliz break is the latest in a run of failures. On July 16 at 4 a.m., a 36-inch transmission trunk line laid in 1916 ruptured beneath Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, releasing an estimated 17 million gallons that ran down Palm Avenue, damaging or destroying roughly 150 to 200 vehicles, flooding dozens of businesses and closing one of the busiest stretches of the Sunset Strip for eight days. On Oct. 8, a break opened a hole at a Porter Ranch intersection. On Oct. 15, LADWP was still working a multi-day main repair on Sunset Boulevard near Allenford, with Councilmember Traci Park posting a video update urging drivers to avoid the area. A substantial share of the city's water pipes are more than 65 years old.

"It honestly makes me worried about the infrastructure"

A Los Feliz resident interviewed by FOX 11 treated the collapse as a warning sign. "It honestly makes me worried about the infrastructure," the resident said. "I know they just did a bunch of work along Franklin and they were digging and stuff."

Two other sinkholes in the news are separate

A long-growing sinkhole on Fanshawe Street in Philadelphia's Mayfair neighborhood, where emergency repairs only began Oct. 5, and a collapse on Malibu's Sea Level Drive blamed on coastal erosion are unrelated events that drew coverage the same week.

What happens next

Expect backfill, repaving and restored water service within days — LADWP has not committed to a timetable, and the street will stay closed while the work is done. The harder questions are the ones a single 8-inch pipe cannot answer: whether this segment had been inspected before it failed, whether it is now queued for replacement, and how many 1938-vintage mains are still carrying water under streets like this one.