Joe Mihelic
Period 6
10-09-07
Before the twentieth century little was thought of the drought-ridden Los Angeles, painfully located in the middle of a California desert. While many of the city’s exhausted residents prepared to move on to greener pastures in 1904, William Mulholland planned to move greener pastures in. By 1905 he had deceitfully acquired the water rights to a majority of the land in the fertile "Owens Valley" to the North. He envisioned an aqueduct that would cover 233 miles in order to provide water to the thirsty people below. Now, nearly a century has passed and the city has multiplied a hundred-fold, assuming possession of water from a multitude of sources. A thriving staple of America’s consumer nature, its success and greatest pitfalls are due cohesively to its unforgivable legacy of trickery and deceit.
Los Angeles’s economic success has been a reflection of the efficiency of its water systems since it was founded in 1781. The city’s original inhabitants, a group of 44 people, were able to found a small pueblo by first constructing an earthen dam along the Los Angeles river. Over the years, however, the pueblo grew into a city with a rapidly increasing population of 1,610 people by 1848. The city managed to survive by expanding its rudimentary water systems and exploiting the Los Angeles river without concern for sustainability. In 1857 the city council decided to franchise their water rights in order to update their piping systems, but their efforts largely failed and the rights eventually fell into the hands of the Los Angeles City Water Company led by a self taught engineer named William Mulholland.
By 1902 Los Angeles’s population had risen to about 85,000 people, its river had become a creek, and the citizens demanded more water. Fred Eaton, the city engineer at the time, successfully motioned to re-claim the city’s water rights and start a-new. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) was then formed with Mulholland still as its superintendent, and plans were formed to find a new source of water.
As rapid population growth over the next several years prompted an even greater sense of urgency Mulholland and Eaton sought North to Owens Valley for the answer to their prayers. Eaton hastily went about secretly acquiring the water rights to all of the land in and around the Owens valley, claiming it would be used for a local agricultural project, and re-selling it to the city of Los Angeles for the construction of an aqueduct. The plans were set in stone by 1905 and the Los Angeles aqueduct was up and running by 1913. By 1920 the city had become home to a majority percent of America’s aviation and motion picture industries, and its population had reached 576,670 people. This sort Cosmopolitan, made possible by the aqueduct, may just have been Mulholland’s dream.
By 1924, as 50 miles of the Owens river was now dry, the city’s excessive consumption of water had effectively raped its neighbor’s landscape. Furious, a small number of farmers from the valley revolted, setting off dynamite to destroy the pipeline. Their effect was barely felt by the people of Los Angeles, but the city acted quickly nonetheless, condemning the unknown rebels as enemies of the state and they soon gave up. Their message, however important, was completely ignored as the aqueduct was believed to benefit the greater good for the greater number.
Mulholland had successfully carried the weight of his people’s water thus far, and in 1926 he added even more to the load when he finished construction on the St. Francis Dam. The new structure was designed to create a reservoir for the Los Angeles aqueduct, but its foundation was mistakenly built on an unstable San Francisquito rock. In 1928 the dam collapsed, taking around 600 victims as twelve billion gallons of water traveled 52 miles from the St. Francis Dam to the Pacific ocean. The city immediately reinforced a new dam with an identical shape and design in a more stable location in order to meet the demand of Los Angeles’s still growing economy. The new structure was named Mulholland dam.
Los Angeles continued to deplete their Owens Valley water supply, and by 1932 it was apparent that they would yet again require a new source. They set plans to extend the aqueduct North to Mono Lake. Before completing the new addition, however, the city managed to suck the Owens Valley bone dry. Los Angeles, though, had no need to worry, because their new aqueduct was up and running by1941 and its new victim, Mono Lake, was completely ripe.
Having witnessed the plight of their neighbors to the south, the people who lived near Mono Lake had nothing to do but worry. It was not until 1978, however, that David Gaines founded the Mono Lake committee, which managed to sue the LADWP concerning the state of Mono Lake in 1983, arguing that they had failed to meet the requirements of the public trust doctrine. This law ensured that navigable bodies of water be managed for the benefit of all people. In 1994 the LADWP was told that they legally must return enough water to raise Mono lake 20 feet. By 2003 the water level, however, had only risen 9 feet.
Currently, Los Angeles consumes about 200 billion gallons of water annually with an estimated population of 3,849,400 people. Of these 200 billion gallons, 48% comes from the Sierra Nevada through the Los Angeles Aqueduct, 41% comes from the California and Colorado River Aqueducts, and 10% is from locally harvested groundwater. All of these sources are a detriment to California’s ecosystem. A whopping 1%, however, is created through desalinization and recycling.
The irresponsible management of the Los Angeles river as population rose during the 1850's and on and the urban sprawl just at the cusp of the nineteenth century were two of Los Angeles’s most crucial turning points that led to the formation of the behemoth metropolis that it is today. Most importantly, however, it would not exist as it does today without the aid of the original 233 mile Los Angeles aqueduct of Mulholland’s inspiration. Obvious evidence of this fact is that one of the city’s largest economic booms occurred in the years directly following the completion of the aqueduct.
Were Mulholland’s aqueduct never built, our society would be no different than it is today. As growing metropolises all over the United States at the turn of the century continued to expand, so too did the necessity to redirect water. And as American nature continues to prove time and time again, where there is demand, supply will always follow, no matter what the environmental cost. This is a pessimistic point of view, yes, because it places the blame on us, society, rather than William Mulholland alone. It requires that every person look at himself as both the cause of and the cure for our wasteful ways. It is a realistic perspective, however, because only when society as a whole comes to this realization can any change whatsoever be made.