Los Angeles is one earthquake away from losing a major part of their water supply.

The city of Los Angeles gets almost 90 percent of its water from three major aqueducts.  These aqueducts run from the Colorado River, Owens Valley and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

The aqueducts cross the well-known San Andreas Fault a total of 32 times.

This means any major quake along that fault line could end the water supply into the nation’s second largest city.

Mayor Eric Garcetti is calling on city officials to create better plans to protect the city’s water supply.

“[Water is] one of L.A.’s greatest earthquake vulnerabilities,” Garcetti told the L.A. Times. “If it were to take six months to get our water system back … residents and businesses would be forced to relocate for so long that they might never come back.”

Officials are looking to San Francisco’s Public Utilities Commission for a possible solution.  The SFPUC recently installed a specially designed pipe over a fault line that has “accordion-like joints” that would allow the pipe to flex and move in any direction should the fault line move.

“We’re the first city that’s really bet its life on outside water,” U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones told the Times. “We have to cross the faults. There’s no way to not go over the fault.”

“There should be a serious dialogue among the agencies that are responsible for the three sources of water to Southern California,” said Thomas O’Rourke, a Cornell University engineering professor. “Sometimes it’s very difficult to go beyond those institutional barriers…. Somebody just has to take it up.”