Tuesday, 20 Jul 1999
OWENS VALLEY, Calif.
"In the East, to 'waste' water is to consume it needlessly or excessively. In the West, to waste water is not to consume it -- to let it flow unimpeded and undiverted down rivers."
-- Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
Folks around the Mono Lake Basin and elsewhere up and down the highway 395 corridor refer to it simply as "DWP," assuming you know what they're talking about. If you live in Lee Vining, or Lone Pine, or Independence, or anywhere along the lower east side of California's Sierras, those initials would more likely than not exact an immediate response. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power -- headquartered a good 250 miles to the southwest -- has left an indelible mark on both the people and the places all along the Owens River valley. For here began the first real water projects in the West, most of them the brainchildren of an Irish engineer turned Angeleno named William Mulholland.
Mulholland, driven.
At the turn of the century, the Owens Valley was reputedly an agricultural oasis, feeding orchards and farms with a seemingly endless source of snowmelt cascading off the backside of the Sierras. The Valley, though, also happened to be one of the few distant water sources that wouldn't require a little help making it over the mountain ranges that surround Los Angeles on three sides. At more than 4,000 feet in elevation, water from the Owens River could flow to L.A. at sea level without the need for pumps and electricity, a fact that had drawn the attention of Mulholland. It was, after all, 1905; gravity was an engineer's best friend. And so, quietly but methodically, the City of Los Angeles began buying both land and water rights throughout the length of the Valley, and one of the most memorable water wars in the history of the West began. When it was all over, some 25 years later, the enormous Owens Lake (still curiously colored blue to this day on several local maps) had vanished, as had much of the river feeding it.
Los Angeles Aqueduct.
Though, I should add, not without a good fight. As farms throughout Owens Valley began to turn a year-round brown and news spread that their precious water was actually proving to be unneeded in L.A. for the time being (instead it was being used to irrigate orchards in the little-known San Fernando Valley to the north of the burgeoning metropolis), folks got a little upset. First they diverted the open channel aqueduct back into the old riverbed. Then they did it again. Finally they began to blow things up --literally. It wasn't until a deal was finally announced that supposedly protected a share of the farmers' water rights that people backed down. The deal, of course, collapsed -- as did the orchards up and down the valley.
For Los Angeles, the Owens Valley claim was just the beginning. The mighty Colorado was next. And soon thereafter, square in their sights, stood the waters of Mono Lake several hundred miles to the north of the Owens River source. Just two years before the diversion of the lake began, writers compiling "The WPA Guide to California" in 1939 heralded the fact that the waters would soon be put to good use. "Though it appears fresh and inviting, Mono Lake is actually a briny deep, in which nothing but one small species of salt water shrimp and the larvae of one tiny black fly can live," they explained in the Guide. "But the water that feeds Mono Lake will not go to waste much longer, for, soon purified, it will go into the new Mono Basin Aqueduct and help to slake the thirst of metropolitan Los Angeles."
By the 1980s, levels at Mono Lake were half what they were when diversions began in 1941. Far from lifeless, biologists had discovered rare species living in and around the prehistoric lake, not the least important of which were many migratory bird populations, including thousands of California Gulls that used the two islands in the middle of the lake as breeding grounds. Due largely to the tireless efforts of local activists organized as the Mono Lake Committee, the courts struck a monumental blow to the City of Los Angeles in the early 1990s by ordering fewer stream diversions and increased water levels in order to protect both the lake and its surrounding residents, who had to endure noxious dust storms as a result of receding waters.
Of course, this is still California, where the past is reinvented on a daily basis and we can't resist reducing history into a feel-good saga to soothe the senses. The 1939 "WPA Guide to California" makes no mention of the local uprising a decade earlier that for a brief time turned the towns straddling U.S. 395 into veritable police states. Some 30 years later, though, Hollywood did decide to make a movie based on the battle over water rights, which had consumed the very same towns that ironically became movie sets for the countless westerns being turned out by the studios. The 1950s looking back at the 1920s, a curious thing unto itself, made all the more surreal by the actor chosen to defend the needs of a thirsty metropolis and the role of progress, knocking some sense into those unruly and restless Owens Valley rednecks: John Wayne.
Learn more about the ongoing efforts to preserve Mono Lake at http://www.monolake.org.
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