Drain - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 136

across the West, who invoke it, and the movie Chinatown,to resist the expropriation of
rural water to fuel urban growth.
In 1990, citizens in the Sierra foothills rallied to oppose the East Bay Municipal Util-
ity District, near San Francisco, from piping water from the Mokelumne River, declar-
ing, “This county can't let itself be turned into a twenty-first-century Owens Valley so
residents of the East Bay can wash their cars in pure mountain water.”
In northeastern California, residents of Honey Lake Valley fought against the devel-
opment of a pipeline just over the border, in Nevada. The $100 million project would
pump water from the aquifer beneath Fish Springs Ranch in a 28.6-mile-long pipe, up a
steep mountain, to new housing developments around Sparks, outside Reno. “Natives,
fearing that history may repeat, have begun to fight,” the SacramentoBeereported. “We
all know what happened in the Owens Valley. The fear is here.” After several aborted at-
tempts to develop a water pipeline, the owners of Fish Springs Ranch, Dr. Harry Brown
and Franklin Raines , made a deal in 2002 with Vidler Water Company, a private water
development firm, to develop the deep aquifer beneath the ten-thousand-acre ranch. As
he toured me along the nearly completed pipeline in the spring of 2008, Brown scoffed
at his opponents' claim that pumping water from Fish Springs Ranch would affect the
aquifer in California. “Taking water from our valley will not affect them in the slightest,”
Brown thundered. “This has nothing to do with Owens Valley!”
Shortly after my visit, the Bureau of Land Management agreed with Brown and
green-lit the pipeline, which was completed in 2009 and is now in service.
The most ambitious water-conveyance project in America today is a plan to suck water
from desert valleys in rural Nevada down to Las Vegas through a pipeline nearly as long
as the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The project has been brewing for years, has cost millions
of dollars, has turned neighbors against each other, and has even embroiled Senate Ma-
jority Leader Harry Reid in a sharp dispute between the city and his former allies in rur-
al communities. Of all the water schemes currently being debated, the Las Vegas plan
has the closest parallels to the Owens Valley, despite what its backers maintain.