CREWS TO FILL SLOPE, COVER PIPE.

Byline: Douglas Clark Daily News Staff Writer

Calleguas Municipal Water District crews must stabilize a Wood Ranch hillside where heavy rains have eroded four feet of soil, exposing a 51-inch water main that supplies the region's drinking water.

While there is no threat to the water that serves 500,000 households from Simi Valley to Oxnard, a 30-foot-long section of the massive pipe must be protected from storms, said General Manager Don Kendall.

``It's not in any danger of failing,'' he said. ``But typically a line like that has four feet of cover on it. It's gone - flat-out gone. We're basically seeing what we need to do if it does rain again so we don't have slope failure out there.''

Calleguas engineers discovered the erosion when they inspected the lines after pounding rainstorms at the beginning of the week. Kendall said sites in Thousand Oaks, Oxnard and Moorpark also showed signs of erosion.

``Other erosion problems have been worse because they've gone under the pipeline, which means the pipes could collapse from their own weight,'' he said.

Kendall said the 51-inch pipe in Simi Valley, which carries about 650,000 gallons of water a day, is the only one in service now because a 78-inch line near Madera Road is being repaired.

Although the work on that line should have been completed this week, the obstacle of having to dig 24 feet deep to reach the area that needed repair slowed workers. He said the pipe work should be done by next week.

``There have been no outages because of the rain and we've been on top of all the erosion issues and we've tried to anticipate problems before they become bigger problems,'' he said.