Drain - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 134

“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 Califor-
nia, 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, metaphor-
ically, 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.he 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 (smal-
ler than ten microns in diameter), salt, arsenic, and alkalies into the air and carry them
across the Mojave Desert. hese 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 down-
wind. 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 Mul-
holland's famous line by declaring of the water, “Here it is. Take it back!”