But Edgar Freud, a retired engineer and a coalition member, blames broken pipes, not birds.
The water system also requires large-scale repairs; when it rains, broken pipes allow sewage to leak into the system.
More than a hundred years later, Mao Zedong adopted a more ruthless version of Lin Zexu's approach, tearing up fields, breaking pipes, and executing dealers.
Last October, the World Bank and its partners staged the first ever global "water hackathon," with volunteer tech experts in London devising a system to allow Tanzanians to report water problems through SMS messages, and tech experts in Lagos devising new applications for reporting broken pipes.
Three of the 296 nodes had a pressure lower than 1 bar, suggesting that 1 % of the nodes present may have broken pipes.
McDaniel and other managers of the city-owned utility were called before the committee to explain what went wrong when broken pipes deluged part of the UCLA campus with about 20 million gallons of water — and what it would take to start mending its woebegone waterworks.
Water from a broken pipe flowed into the five-foot crater left by the bomb.
On May 12, BP released a single, 30-second video clip that showed oil and gas gushing from a broken pipe.
But plumbers, building managers and real estate lawyers said they were hard pressed to think of a single recent horror story of a flood or broken pipe caused by the appliance.
