Most reporters in Los Angeles could tell you who the main L.A. Department of Water and Power spokesman is. He's a City Hall veteran, and if you cover this town, you'll have run across him.

But the odd-sounding name of this particular DWP spokesman didn't appear to set off any alarms when he phoned ABC Eyewitness News yesterday to offer a live-on-air update to the UCLA-adjacent water main break.

See also: UCLA Flooded by Tons of Water (PHOTOS)

The name he gave was Louis Slungpue (as in “slung poo”). And it went downhill from there:

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millionmillionmillionMr. Slungpue of the DWP said that crews believed the main break, which sent 8 million to 10 million gallons of water onto the UCLA campus, flooding parking structures and athletic facilities, was caused by “a couple of college students might have sent down a cherry bomb down the toilet.”

That's right. A glorified firecracker set this off and closed Sunset Boulevard.

“Wow,” one of the anchors replies. “Say that again. Somebody sent a cherry bomb down the toilet?”

Slungpue took his cue:

“Yeah,” he says. “We try to put on seminars yearly explaining how dangerous it is to send any kind of explosives down the plumbing drain.”

” … The cherry bomb must have popped through the top of the pipe and just blew the bottom right out,” he said.


He told the anchors that DWP crews believed the source was “one of the locker rooms” on campus.

The anchors continued to dig a deeper hole for themselves. And, of course, Slungpue dropped his bomb, so to speak:

“It was either a cherry bomb or someone took a really large dump, you know,” he said.

One of the anchors says, “That is an incredible … are you 100 percent sure about that?”

And then you hear an off-camera voice almost whisper what we made out to be, “It's a prank call.” An anchor tells viewers, ” … We lost him. I'm sorry.”

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