Drain - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 129

CHAPTER 14
Drain
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
“THE MOTHER'S MILK OF LOS ANGELES”
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 fam-
ily, 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, super-
intendent 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 grow-
ing 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 LosAngelesTimes,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.