[The strange spray-painted glyphs marking “our subterranean infrastructure”; image source.]
Nicola Twilley walks with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, for Good Magazine‘s Los Angeles issue:
“Armed only with a manila folder stuffed full of clippings, archive photos, and annotated printouts from Wikimapia, our first stop is the median strip on the 9500 block of Venice Boulevard. With cars racing past on either side, we negotiated our way through scrubby bushes and Styrofoam cups to find the site of one of the most lethal gasoline pipeline explosions in United States history. In June, 1976, a construction crew working on a road-widening project sliced through a Standard Oil petroleum pipeline that was 18 inches nearer the surface than expected. The resulting explosion, Coolidge explains, destroyed the north side of the block and killed nine people. In response to the disaster, California instituted its now-standard DigAlert system, a warning code whose red (electric), green (sewers), orange (communications), and yellow (gas) spray-paint markings are visible (although largely overlooked) on concrete and blacktop across the state, inscribing our subterranean infrastructure on Earth’s surface.
The effect of this information is hard to describe. One minute I’m standing in a nondescript median, surrounded by six lanes of traffic and looking at the skinnier cousin of a fire hydrant; the next, I’m situated at the very center of some sort of infrastructural navel, from which a tangled tracery of colored lines, arrows, and numbers radiates outward across the streets of California.”
Read the full article at Good. Twilley, with Geoff Manaugh, also contributes to the same issue of Good a brief tour of L.A.’s urban wildlife, from the Exotic Animal Training School as “a controlled ecology of domesticated wilderness fit for popular consumption” to mosquito fish breeding sites.
