Even the DWP staff had a laugh at that one.

The Department of Water and Power came to Marshall High School last week to submit to a public lashing over the agency’s plan to improve the water in several urban reservoirs.

It was an evening of high rhetoric, beginning with the agency’s own.

“Participate!” shouted a flyer promoting the fifth of nine sessions being held across the city. “The city of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power invites you to participate in shaping a program to maintain and enhance the quality of the water you drink.”

About 500 residents and two politicians answered the call, nearly filling the high school auditorium. Most of them had been participating for quite some time without solicitation by the DWP. They made it clear that they think the agency does not want their participation and will do whatever it pleases unless they stop it.

What it wants to do, they believe, is to deface 10 jewel-like urban reservoirs by putting covers over six of them and building filtration plants next to the other four. Three on the list for covers are Elysian, Rowena and Ivanhoe, all within a couple of miles of Marshall High School. Ivanhoe forms the smaller part of the reservoir that gives Silver Lake its name. The larger part, Silver Lake proper, may be in line for a filtration plant.

Technically speaking, the meeting Thursday night was a “scoping” session for an environmental impact report. Its purpose was to gather insights on what the report should consider. The public, however, chose to interpret the invitation more broadly as an occasion to demonstrate its mettle for a long campaign.

Outside, members of the Coalition to Preserve Open Reservoirs waved a few placards. Otherwise, they were generally diplomatic. They refrained from shouting down the DWP staff. They waited their turn to speak. They held their applause for a few dramatic moments.

Assemblyman Mike Roos (D-Los Angeles), a resident of Silver Lake, spoke first and set the proper martial tone.

“Look into the faces in this room tonight,” Roos said. “Residents of our community are buffeted by powerful forces they cannot control, forces tearing at the very fabric of our neighborhoods: crime, drug abuse, urban blight, traffic gridlock. Now they are concerned that a public agency, an institution that should be working with them, may take away the very foundation of our neighborhood, the centerpiece that helps define and preserve our neighborhood.”

Councilman Michael Woo, who also lives in Silver Lake, offered his own definition of audience participation.

“Only by having a large, organized and vocal opposition to covering reservoirs will we be able to stop what I believe is a senseless folly on the part of the DWP,” he said.

That was one of the dramatic moments when the audience let loose.

The DWP’s obviously practiced method for handling the criticism was to offer no response at all.

Though several of its top officials attended, the agency did not conduct the meeting itself. That job was in the hands of a professional facilitator hired for the series.

He said his role was simply to gather information. Even under intense provocation, he kept his composure.

When one speaker, Bennett Kayser, called the water improvement program a sham and suggested that it should be the “alleged water improvement project,” the facilitator asked smoothly what it should be called instead.

“Filtration and covering for 10 reservoirs,” Kayser snapped back.

“I’m sorry I asked,” the facilitator quipped.

Kayser suggested adding mental health as a component of the environmental study.

“What’s going to happen to the people of Silver Lake when instead of seeing a reservoir, they see a filtration plant down there?” he asked.

Some speakers offered quasi-scientific, others personal experience to counter the DWP’s approach.

One man said he lived through a dysentery outbreak caused by fungus that grew under a reservoir cover.

“Saying that covering these reservoirs is some sort of solution to clean water, it isn’t at all,” he said. “It’s just creating another problem. It’s sort of gunge in the Thermos.”

Even the DWP staff had a laugh at that one.

But they became stone-faced a few minutes later when Dale Flanagan of the Committee to Save Silver Lake’s Reservoirs quoted from a document that he said was written 12 years ago by the DWP staff.

“The resistance met during a recent construction of the Silver Lake reservoir indicates the typical response likely to be encountered if any view of the water surface is diminished.”

Waving the document overhead, he said: “Heed your own warnings . . . Because I can guarantee you, you’re not going to have a fight on your hands. You’re going to have a war.”

The facilitator waited for the cheers to die down before observing dryly:

“I think it’s terribly unfair to use our own words against us like that.”

At an appropriately dramatic moment, a speaker called for a show of hands on who was on his side. Hundreds of hands shot up.

It’s going to be a long one.