LOS ANGELES (AP) The famed hardwood court at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion will be replaced because of damage caused when 20 million gallons of water cascaded onto campus from a broken water main, the school announced Friday.
In addition, the university began removing hundreds of cars that were swamped in underground parking structures.
Athletic Director Dan Guerrero said in a statement that the entire floor at Pauley will be replaced by the end of October, and no regular season basketball games would be affected.
No details were provided on the cost of replacing the floor.
Pauley Pavilion underwent a $136 million upgrade just two years ago.
New flooring also will be installed at the Hall of Fame at the J.D. Morgan Center and at a court in the John Wooden Center that is used for women's volleyball games, Guerrero said.
The announcement came as the university continued to clean up the mucky mess that occurred Tuesday when a century-old pipe broke on nearby Sunset Boulevard.
The amount of water released represented about 4 percent of the total used by the entire city on an average day and occurred in the midst of an epic state drought.
Elsewhere on campus, a parade of tow trucks removed about 400 vehicles that were submerged in the deluge, UCLA spokesman Tod Tamberg said. The process could take several days because workers were still pumping out water and digging through muck and debris.
About 270 cars not damaged by water were removed earlier, and made available to owners.
UCLA officials said six facilities were damaged in the flooding. Two - the Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center and the Drake Track and Field Stadium - were reopened Thursday, Tamberg said.
At the site of the broken main, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power crews cut away 66 feet of the damaged steel pipe. The ruptured section will be sent to DWP corrosion experts for analysis.
The Y-shaped junction will be replaced with a T-shaped connector for three pipes that will have extra steel plating to protect the joint. Crews were preparing two, 36-inch-diameter butterfly valves, each weighing two tons, as part of the repairs, a DWP statement said.
The repairs were expected to continue through Friday or early Saturday, with work then beginning to repair a gaping hole in the heavily traveled street.
