The first rule of water is that it flows uphill, towards money and power.
—Edward Moran, attorney general of Mono County,
California, to his children, circa 1954
A desert is a place that gets ten inches of rainfall or less a year. Los Angeles receives an average of eight inches of rain per year and was built on a coastal desert where native water supplies can support perhaps a million people, at best.
In 1898 Frederick Eaton, an engineer and politician from a prominent Pasadena family, was elected mayor of Los Angeles. He appointed his friend William Mulholland, an Irish-born self-taught water engineer who had once been an itinerant ditchdigger, superintendent of the Los Angeles City Water Company, which later became the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP). The two men envisioned turning the growing city—a hot, dry oil and railroad and ranching hub of about one hundred thousand strong in 1900—into a major metropolis, a glorious new city that would rival New York and Chicago as a center of commerce and power. All that Los Angeles required to grow was water.
The closest major water reserves lay over two hundred miles to the northeast, in the Owens Valley, where snow melts off the mountains in great quantities. Known as the Switzerland of California, the Owens Valley runs about seventy-five miles long and stretches between the eleven-thousand-foot Inyo Mountains to the east and the fourteen-thousand-foot Sierra Nevada to the west. The Owens River runs down the length of the valley, collecting water as it goes. At the southern end of the valley is Owens Lake, a broad, shallow body of water fed by the Owens River.
At the turn of the century, the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency responsible for water management in the West, was planning to build an irrigation system there, to aid Owens Valley farmers. But Eaton and Mulholland, backed by a syndicate of powerful investors including Harrison Gray Otis, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and his son-in-law and successor, Harry Chandler, had another, secret plan: to build a massive aqueduct to suck water from the high Owens Valley down to coastal Los Angeles.
Eaton, whose family had founded Pasadena, pulled strings in state political circles and met with President Theodore Roosevelt’s advisers in Washington, DC, to quash the Bureau of Reclamation’s irrigation plan. At the same time, Eaton quietly bought up water rights and large parcels of land in Owens Valley, with the idea of selling them to Los Angeles for a vast personal profit.
When the city’s secret aqueduct plan was revealed in 1905, the farmers, ranchers, and miners in Owens Valley rose up in protest. But it was too late. Eaton and his friends had used a combination of bribes, intimidation, and legitimate purchases to seize control of the valley’s water rights. Over the next twenty-five years, Los Angeles gained control of nearly a quarter of the Owens Valley.
While valley residents grew alarmed by the city’s takeover, Eaton, Chandler, and Otis persuaded the citizens of Los Angeles that an aqueduct was necessary to ensure the survival of the city. They used all manner of persuasion, including planting false stories in the Los Angeles Times that gave the impression the city was facing drought, and forbidding people from watering their lawns, all the while lowering the city’s water supply by dumping it into sewers. What the conspirators didn’t say was that Owens Valley water would not only feed the city but would also be used to irrigate the San Fernando Valley, a semidesert region just north of Los Angeles that was not legally part of the city. Otis, Chandler, and others bought up large parcels in the valley and pushed for the bond that would fund the construction of the aqueduct. In the summer of 1906, President Roosevelt allowed the aqueduct to cross federal lands. The following year, spooked by the idea that they were running out of water, Angelenos voted to approve $22.5 million in bonds to build a 233-mile-long aqueduct to bring water from Owens Valley to the city.
William Mulholland oversaw the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which became the world’s longest at the time. Starting in 1908, the project took five years and required over two thousand workers and the boring of 164 tunnels to drain water from the elevated Owens Valley to the San Fernando Valley and the city, at sea level. When Owens water first spilled into the San Fernando reservoir, north of Los Angeles, on November 5, 1913, Mulholland famously declared, “There it is. Take it.”
In 1915, Los Angeles annexed the mostly rural San Fernando Valley, more than doubling the size of the city. With Sierra Nevada runoff flowing through the aqueduct, the arid San Fernando region was transformed into a major center of corn, cotton, citrus, and walnut growing. By 1960, the valley had over a million inhabitants; by 2007, the valley’s population had reached 1.7 million.
The aqueduct also had a major impact on Owens Valley. The city’s water withdrawals drained the hundred-square-mile Owens Lake and desertified the valley’s land. As a result, most farming and ranching became impossible there. Owens Valley residents rebelled and began to sabotage the aqueduct. In the “civil war” of November 1924, a group of enraged citizens dynamited the Lone Pine spillway gate, which controlled water flow in the aqueduct, seized control of another large water-control gate, and dynamited the aqueduct where it crossed Jawbone Canyon. No one was arrested. Over the next three years, which included a drought in the summer of 1926, the fight over Owens Valley water simmered, and ranchers occasionally opened sluice gates to divert the flow of water back into the valley.
In 1927, as Los Angeles continued to ignore the pleas of valley residents for more water, angry ranchers again dynamited sections of the aqueduct. The city’s leaders responded by dispatching a force of private detectives. A half dozen ranchers were arrested, but the case was dropped for lack of evidence. By 1928, Los Angeles had gained control of 90 percent of the water rights in Owens Valley, which effectively ended most agriculture, ranching, and mining there.
This California “water war” formed the basis for Roman Polanski’s classic film noir of the seventies, Chinatown, which starred Jack Nicholson as a private investigator who becomes embroiled in machinations over Los Angeles’s theft of water from a rural valley. In the movie’s dark vision, power brokers consider water a resource so vital it is worth stealing and killing for.
The water Mulholland and Eaton brought from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles created vast fortunes for a few, encouraged the proliferation of irrigated orchards and other agriculture in the San Fernando Valley, and led to suburban sprawl. Los Angeles’s growth became self-perpetuating: the availability of water created demand for more housing and jobs, which naturally created demand for more water. By 1924, Owens Lake had been sucked dry, while almost all of the Owens River and groundwater along the length of Owens Valley were being diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. To reach more water, planners at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power dreamed of extending the aqueduct farther north, tunneling a pipeline through the Mono Craters to tap the watershed around the high, mysterious Mono Lake.
Said to be the oldest lake in North America, and one of the oldest in the world, Mono is a large and strangely beautiful lake fed by streams and rain. An endorheic lake, meaning it is self-contained and does not flow into rivers and the ocean, it has slowly been evaporating since the Pleistocene epoch. Sedimentary records indicate that the lake we see today is the same body of water that has occupied the Mono Basin since its formation some 730,000 years ago.
Like the Great Salt Lake or Pyramid Lake or the Salton Sea, the waters of Mono Lake have become hypersaline. Filled with dissolved carbonates, sulfates, and sodium salts of chlorides, they are rich in borate and potassium. The carbonates render the lake highly alkaline; with a pH of 10, about the same as household glass cleaner, its waters have a viscous look and a slippery feel, like soapy water, and the bitter-tasting brine will destroy clothing.
Due to a salinity of between 5 and 8 percent—double the oceans’ salinity—the lake’s waters are inhospitable to fish and most other creatures, but Mono holds an enormous population of brine shrimp and alkali flies. More than seventy species of migratory and nesting birds feed on the shrimp and fly blooms. (Experts say that if the lake’s salinity increases to 13.3 percent, the shrimp population will collapse.)
To L.A.’s water planners, the supersaline waters of the lake were not of immediate value, but its many clear tributary streams were a valuable prize.
According to the California historian William Kahrl, Mulholland’s agents had scouted Mono Basin as a new water supply and even acquired a few water rights there as early as 1913. But Los Angeles was competing with local power companies, farmers, miners, and even the city of San Diego for Mono’s water. In 1920, Mulholland and his friend Arthur Powell Davis, head of the federal Reclamation Service, concocted a deal whereby Reclamation engineers would prepare detailed plans for an extension of the Los Angeles Aqueduct to the Mono Basin—work that Los Angeles would pay for and retain control of—in the name of irrigating the Owens Valley and the possible construction of hydroelectric dams. Under this pretext, Mulholland gained political cover from his competitors and access to land for an extension of his aqueduct.
To the LADWP, characterizing Mono as “lifeless” or “a dead sea” helped deflect interest from the lake’s water and made the case for diverting its tributary streams for its own purposes. Los Angeles engineers initiated a project to “reclaim” the basin’s “wasted” waters and declared that “to salvage the water in Mono Basin being lost in the saline waters of Mono Lake” was a noble cause. In 1930, Los Angeles voters approved a $38 million bond issue to extend the city’s aqueduct into Mono Basin. As in the Owens Valley, Los Angeles’s agents bought out property owners, brought lawsuits, condemned property, and used whatever means they could to grab the water rights in the Mono Basin. With those rights secured, in 1934 they began to build the Mono extension of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
In 1941, after six years of backbreaking work by eighteen hundred men, a tunnel connecting the Mono and Owens Valleys was completed. It extended the length of LADWP’s aqueduct to 350 miles. As water from the tributary streams feeding Mono Lake was diverted south to Los Angeles, the effect was dramatic: within a few years, the volume of Mono Lake was cut in half and the salinity of its water doubled. Algae, the base of the lake’s food chain, could no longer photosynthesize efficiently. Islands that were once important nesting sites became peninsulas accessible to predators; bird populations were wiped out or driven away. As the lake bed was exposed, winds swept particulates into the air, causing bronchial problems for people nearby. But Mono County was sparsely populated and hundreds of miles from Los Angeles. As water levels dropped, few noticed or cared—except for those who lived there.
The water table of the Owens and Mono Basins has always fluctuated several feet with the seasons, but in the spring of 1953, Mono County grew exceptionally dry. This was odd, because the snowpack and rainfall had been normal that year. In the early 1950s, Edward Moran, father of the Denver-based hydrogeologist Bob Moran, was the attorney general of Mono County. He grew curious about the mysterious drying of his jurisdiction and began to nose around.
Ed Moran spoke to local ranchers and miners, who told him that almost every drop of water in Mono Basin was being diverted. Hiking the steepsided watershed around the town of Lee Vining, which overlooks the lake, Moran discovered that nearly every little spring and creek that hydrated Mono Basin was being tapped, and wells had been dug around the lake’s perimeter to access seeping groundwater.
“Holy shit, Los Angeles is stealing all our water!” Moran said. Far from being cowed by this discovery, Moran—the son of an Irish cop in San Francisco, a man who enjoyed a good fight—was thrilled. “My dad was like a kid in a candy shop at Mono,” recalled Bob Moran. “It was the biggest case of his career.”
“Water is the mother’s milk of Los Angeles,” Ed Moran instructed his children. “No water, no L.A. People never understood this fact, and they still don’t.”
He decided to open the city’s eyes.
In early 1954, Ed Moran filed suit against Los Angeles, claiming that the city was taking far more water from the Mono Basin than it was legally allowed. That spring he won a significant legal victory against the LADWP, his son Bob recalled, which required the city to pay Mono County’s taxes. (The details of this case remain murky.) “He was asking tough questions: Who thought it was a good idea to drain Mono, and who really benefits? Where is that water going, and how are those withdrawals sustainable? What happens if the basin is totally drained?” said Bob Moran. “My father managed to make a lot of very rich and powerful people in the city very uncomfortable.”
On March 5, 1955, Ed Moran met with state legislators in Sacramento, then had lunch with his cousin. Late that afternoon, he climbed behind the wheel of his car and set out on the long drive home. Sometime that evening, the car veered from the road and plunged off a cliff, killing Ed Moran instantly. He was thirty-eight years old. There were no witnesses. But there were plenty of conspiracy theories about what happened that night. “My father had made a lot of enemies, and there were hints of foul play—‘He was done in by the water barons.’ It was right out of Chinatown,” Bob Moran said. “Some of my family still believe that romantic version of the story, but after all these years I don’t.”
Given the history of violence and political machinations over water in the Golden State, it is certainly possible that Ed Moran was done in by sinister forces. But given that the Mono case had already been resolved, and Ed Moran had gained prominence as a result, it seems more likely that his death was an accident. The larger point, Bob Moran said, is that Los Angeles’s water extractions depleted the Mono and Owens Basins and left simmering tensions up and down Highway 395, the nerve stem of eastern California, nearly a century after the water wars.
I witnessed this tension firsthand. Driving through the town of Bishop one day in 2008, I happened across a colorful mural of a landscape painted on the side of a home-decorating store. The top of the mural, titled Drain, shows the lush Owens Valley, while at the bottom it depicts a rusty pipe labeled LADWP sucking the water, and, metaphorically, the color, out of the landscape. As I stood there, a big white pickup truck with LADWP stenciled on the door slowed and a meaty hand was stuck out the window, the middle finger raised at Drain. The driver gunned his engine and disappeared in a cloud of dusty rancor.
The hundred-square-mile Owens Lake once featured steamships, towns, mills, and mines and provided a rich habitat for birds, fish, and other aquatic life. Today, it has been so thoroughly drained by Los Angeles’s water takings that it is little more than a wide gray sandlot called a playa. Winds kick up huge clouds of superfine dust (smaller than ten microns in diameter), salt, arsenic, and alkalies into the air and carry them across the Mojave Desert. These dust storms are said to remove 4 million tons of dust from the lake bed every year, making Owens Lake the single largest cause of particulate pollution in the nation and regularly violating federal air-quality standards. The dust storms rise as high as 13,500 feet and affect an estimated forty thousand people downwind. Dust from the lake bed has coated three national parks, shut down the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, and caused wide criticism of Los Angeles’s environmental stewardship.
Since 2001, as part of a contentious settlement agreement with valley citizens, the LADWP has built a $500 million sprinkler system to flood twenty-seven square miles of the bed of Owens Lake ankle deep with water—not to restore the lake but to control the dust. In December 2006, by court order, Los Angeles, after missing thirteen deadlines, finally restored 5 percent of the Owens River’s flow. As he turned a knob that opened a new steel gate in the aqueduct, allowing icy emerald-green water to flow into the river for the first time since 1913, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa alluded to Mulholland’s famous line by declaring of the water, “Here it is. Take it back!”
The river now runs about two to six feet deep and flows smoothly south for sixty-two miles. It takes about sixteen days for it to meander through the Owens Valley floodplain, before it pours into storage ponds on the northern edge of dusty Owens Lake. There, four 600-horsepower pumps draw the water up and discharge it back into the concrete and steel aqueduct, where it continues its journey to Los Angeles.
When I visited the Owens River, just a few months after Mayor Villaraigosa’s rewatering ceremony, Michael Prather, a botanist who worked tirelessly for the dust mitigation agreement, drove me along Owens Valley in his rattling pickup truck. “The wildlife and native vegetation are making a slow comeback,” he said, explaining how the thin film of water from the river and the sprinklers on the bed of Owens Lake have had a rejuvenating effect. “The really good news is, the migrating birds have found us again.” He raised his binoculars to peer at gulls, teal, scaup, sandpipers, and blackbirds wheeling in the distance.
During the fall and spring, the shallow waters in Owens Lake come alive with algae and brine flies, which supply food for some fifty thousand migrating birds. Peregrine falcons feed on the birds. Audubon California has designated the lake and its resurging wetlands one of the state’s most important birding areas. Since then, the project has expanded to encompass thirty of the lake’s hundred square miles and added another nine square miles of ponds in 2010; record numbers of birds, of over a hundred species, were counted at the lake in 2008. But California was in its second year of drought, and questions were being raised about the necessity of LADWP’s dust-mitigation efforts. The project had suffered cost overruns and used sixty thousand acre-feet of water a year, which was worth some $54 million and was enough to supply sixty thousand households. Critics thought the money and water could be better spent elsewhere.
By 2009, Los Angeles had become a megacity with 3.8 million residents, in a broad combined statistical area that had swelled to 17.8 million people—thanks in good part to the water drained from Mono County. The city is also hydrated by water from the Sacramento Delta, channeled south by the California Aqueduct, and by the Colorado River, channeled west by the Colorado River Aqueduct.
If current growth rates continue, it is estimated that Los Angeles’s population will reach 33 million by 2020. Where is the water to supply such a megalopolis going to come from?
It is difficult to overstate the significance that Westerners ascribe to the debate over Los Angeles’s water grab. The tension over Owens Valley remains a potent symbol for people across the West, who invoke it, and the movie Chinatown, to resist the expropriation of rural water to fuel urban growth.
In 1990, citizens in the Sierra foothills rallied to oppose the East Bay Municipal Utility District, near San Francisco, from piping water from the Mokelumne River, declaring, “This county can’t let itself be turned into a twenty-first-century Owens Valley so residents of the East Bay can wash their cars in pure mountain water.”
In northeastern California, residents of Honey Lake Valley fought against the development of a pipeline just over the border, in Nevada. The $100 million project would pump water from the aquifer beneath Fish Springs Ranch in a 28.6-mile-long pipe, up a steep mountain, to new housing developments around Sparks, outside Reno. “Natives, fearing that history may repeat, have begun to fight,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “We all know what happened in the Owens Valley. The fear is here.” After several aborted attempts to develop a water pipeline, the owners of Fish Springs Ranch, Dr. Harry Brown and Franklin Raines, made a deal in 2002 with Vidler Water Company, a private water development firm, to develop the deep aquifer beneath the ten-thousand-acre ranch. As he toured me along the nearly completed pipeline in the spring of 2008, Brown scoffed at his opponents’ claim that pumping water from Fish Springs Ranch would affect the aquifer in California. “Taking water from our valley will not affect them in the slightest,” Brown thundered. “This has nothing to do with Owens Valley!”
Shortly after my visit, the Bureau of Land Management agreed with Brown and green-lit the pipeline, which was completed in 2009 and is now in service.
The most ambitious water-conveyance project in America today is a plan to suck water from desert valleys in rural Nevada down to Las Vegas through a pipeline nearly as long as the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The project has been brewing for years, has cost millions of dollars, has turned neighbors against each other, and has even embroiled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in a sharp dispute between the city and his former allies in rural communities. Of all the water schemes currently being debated, the Las Vegas plan has the closest parallels to the Owens Valley, despite what its backers maintain.