Drain - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 131

belled 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 wa-
ter 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 wa-
ter, angry ranchers again dynamited sections of the aqueduct. The city's leaders respon-
ded 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 agricul-
ture, 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 val-
ley. 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 ag-
riculture 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 wa-
ter, 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, mean-
ing 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 forma-
tion 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