Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
public electric and water utility serving Los Angeles, California
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the largest municipal utility in the United States with 8,100 megawatts of electric generating capacity (2021–2022) and delivering an average of 435 million gallons of water per day (487,000 acre-ft per year) to more than four million residents and local businesses in the City of Los Angeles and several adjacent cities and communities in southwestern Los Angeles County, California.
It was founded in 1902 to supply water to residents and businesses in the city of Los Angeles and several of its immediately adjacent communities. In 1917, LADWP began to deliver electricity to portions of the city. It has been involved in a number of controversies, including the 1928 St. Francis Dam failure, and written about in critical media portrayals such as those in the books Water and Power and Cadillac Desert.
History
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." By 1857 the council decided that the system needed to be updated, granting William G. Dryden franchise rights to provide homes with water through a system of underground water mains.
“Los Angeles Department of Water and Power” enters the record as public electric and water utility serving Los Angeles, California. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Angeles, Department and Water can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3259704. VIAF identifies the subject as 124322189. The Library of Congress control number is n79063867. Authority coordinates are 34.058, -118.249. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2021, 2022, 1902 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “Los Angeles Department of Water and Power” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.