Cellphone Video Again Catches Universal Watering During The Day

UNIVERSAL  CITY (CBSLA.com) — It wasn't in the forecast, but rain fell this week on the 101 Freeway near Barham Boulevard in Universal City in the form of manmade precipitation from a sprinkler on the freeway hillside caught on cellphone video.

NBCUniversal said Friday that a broken sprinkler head was gushing water, and it's been fixed.

Normally, that might be the end of the story.

But this is the same spot where another cellphone video captured sprinklers running full blast on a rainy day last month.

Friday, one of the hottest days of the year so far, about 1:15 p.m., the sprinklers were going strong.

So why, when we're watching how and when we use water, is Universal watering in the heat of the day?

The park stood by the statement it provided for our previous story:

"NBCUniversal has a long history of being an environmentally conscious organization. Now more than ever, we are focused on existing and new water conservation measures, which include using recycled water across the property for land irrigation, landscaping with drought tolerant plants and transitioning to all low flow and waterless facilities."

According to the LADWP website, all outdoor watering is prohibited from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

It's unclear if Universal might be exempt from that because it uses recycled water.

But conservation experts say daytime watering, even with nonpotable water, is not recommended or ideal.

"You're also gonna have the highest evaporation losses so that water isn't gonna get down into the soil, into the roots, in to keep your lawn alive," said Tracy Quinn/\ of the Natural Resources Defense Fund. "You want to water during the earliest part of the morning. I would say between 6 and 10 a.m."

By water in the middle of the day, a single lawn can lose as much as 30,000 gallons of a water a year to evaporation, Quinn said.