Cerritos Well Suffers ‘Catastrophic’ Failure

December 19, 2025

By Brian Hews

Last week, Los Cerritos Community News reported extensively on the growing water and sewer infrastructure crisis facing Cerritos, detailing decades of deferred maintenance and the looming financial consequences now confronting the city. Since that report, LCCN has learned exclusively that one of the city’s groundwater sources, Well C-4, has suffered a catastrophic failure.

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According to sources familiar with the system, the failure will require approximately $600,000 in repairs to restore the well to service. In the interim, Cerritos will be forced to purchase imported water to offset the loss of local supply, a stopgap measure that carries significantly higher ongoing costs and further strains the city’s water budget. The C-4 failure adds urgency to the broader infrastructure issues outlined in the city’s own assessment, underscoring how aging wells, pipelines, and facilities are no longer theoretical concerns but active operational liabilities.

The disclosure stands in contrast to recent regional television coverage of the issue. A report by NBC Los Angeles Channel 4 framed the proposed rate increases primarily through protest and outrage, quoting Cerritos Republican political operative Carla Gilhuys as a resident source without providing viewers context about her role or ideological activism.

That coverage gave little attention to the documented system failures now materializing, including the C-4 well collapse, and instead reduced a complex infrastructure and cost-of-service issue to sound bites and percentage figures divorced from underlying facts.

As Cerritos confronts real-time failures and escalating replacement costs, the focus of the discussion increasingly centers not on whether investment is needed, but on how long critical repairs can be delayed before emergency fixes and imported water purchases become the norm rather than the exception.