OAKLAND -- Utility crews using digital technology that listens to underground water continued to search an Oakland hills neighborhood on Wednesday for a leak that may have caused a mudslide and exposed the foundation of one home last month.

Leak detection specialists were called to Oak Hill Road, near the Sequoyah Country Club, by the East Bay Municipal Utility District to find which of its pipes might be leaking. The utility agency had collected water from a recent mudslide and found it to be their treated water, spokeswoman Tracie Morales-Noisy said Wednesday.

"We are operating under the assumption that there is a leak and that it's ours, and we are doing everything we can to find it," Morales-Noisy said. "We're still looking for the source of it."

The specialists were using data loggers -- underground digital devices that record water sounds and transmit data. Morales-Noisy said the devices work best at night, when water activity in nearby homes slows down, but that they are also useful in the day.

"These loggers are installed underground throughout the area, and they will help us narrow down where the source of the leak is," she said. "On Tuesday, we dug up a hole where we thought there may be a leak, but it turned out there wasn't. We'll continue on until we find it."

Many of the pipes on the hill are five or six decades old, Morales-Noisy said.

A house on Oak Hill Road had its foundation exposed in a mudslide about 1 a.m. Jan. 23, after a week of rain.


Homeowner Kevin Best hired a team of workers to shore up the land around the home, and city engineers deemed it safe to live inside.

A surveyor at the scene wound up stuck in the mud 80 feet down the hill three days later and needed to be rescued by Oakland firefighters.

Contact Rick Hurd at 925-945-4789 and follow him at Twitter.com/3rdERH