Water Power : The Los Angeles Aqueduct Opened 75 Years Ago This Month. It Made the Parched L.A. Basin a Boom Town and Created a Controversy That Won’t Dry Up

“There it is. . . . Take it!”--William Mulholland, as the first Owens River watercascaded into the San Fernando Valley on Nov. 5, 1913.

AND WHY shouldn’t the city have taken it? Los Angeles was doomed to sit at the far southern fringe of the Pacific Rain Belt, forever ungreened and unquenched. The snowpack of the Sierra Nevada flowed right by San Francisco as it melted out to sea, and Los Angeles saw none of it. Rains came in sudden infrequent deluges that couldn’t be easily captured; they ran right out of the barren hills, right off the asphalt-like soil. And though the climate was even-tempered, the weather was psychotic: 22 inches of rain one year, 7 inches the next. How long should a great city’s future depend on prayers?

That Los Angeles would become a great city was never in doubt. The climate alone guaranteed it. And the setting--a dazzling plain encircled with great-shouldered peaks in back and a bright ocean in front--a country where one could lay down a city unlike any other. It could become a new civilization of temples and skyscrapers, of orange orchards and grapes, of villas and fuchsia bungalows.

It could be the Valhalla of the West.

It had no water, that was all.

So the city would build an aqueduct. No matter that no great aqueduct had been constructed in 2,000 years, except by New York, and Los Angeles was still a village next to New York. But Angelenos would be the new Romans: That was the romance of the enterprise.

But the more prosaic motive was growth. The city fathers, the ones who plotted and schemed for the aqueduct and bought the initial water rights, deified growth--perhaps because Los Angeles had made such titans out of them. There were Harrison Gray Otis, who had been an unremarkable printer, editor, game warden and consul manque until he founded the Los Angeles Times; Moses Sherman, a placid school administrator until he came to Los Angeles from Arizona and metamorphosed into a fiercely competitive land and rail magnate; Harry Chandler, a New Hampshire refugee with a tubercular cough and a gambler’s heart, who arrived with nothing and built himself an empire on newspapers and land. And William Mulholland, a gruff Irish castoff from a merchant ship who began as a well digger and built the engineering wonder of the world. What a modern Moses this Mulholland was. How many people who go up Mulholland Drive to look over their city know that his aqueduct built it? How many fathom that, without the aqueduct, they’d be looking over Omaha instead, because Los Angeles’ local water sources could support no more than a million people, at most? How many appreciate what an engineering triumph the aqueduct represents?

It was laid from near Independence to Sylmar across treacherous terrain in the most unforgiving desert in North America. Millions of tons of concrete were poured and millions of board-feet of wood were hammered and millions of pounds of steel were flexed into form. Fifty-three of the aqueduct’s 233 miles were in hard rock tunnels, and 6,000 men were employed on and off for six years. When it was finished, under budget and ahead of schedule, it had cost less than $30 million. Adjusting for a modern dollar’s miserable worth, that is comparable to the price of a B-1 bomber or a component of the Aegis aircraft-carrier radar ssystem. And unlike such failure-prone gimcracks, the aqueduct works; it performs unfailing service, its purpose majestically clear.

People still debate whether Los Angeles stole the Owens Valley’s water or got it through legitimate means. There’s an easy answer: It was got through lawful means. But then, the law is unfair sometimes, and this is what the city legally did: Its agents lied to and conspired against the Owens Valley people. It divided and conquered, setting neighbor against neighbor and son against father. It answered sabotage of property (when some Owens Valley firebrands began blowing the aqueduct to smithereens) with orders to shoot to kill. It transformed a fruitful valley into an alkaline bowl of dust.

But it is those who live in Los Angeles, not the people of the Owens Valley, who are really paying for what the city did. They are the ones suffering through smog alerts, dreadful traffic, jammed beaches and mind-numbing sprawl. Water equals growth, and growth equals water; the cycle seems without end.

When the population overwhelmed the first aqueduct’s capacity, the city enlarged it. Then in the 1930s, Los Angeles turned to the Colorado River; its sheer numbers forced the federal government to build Hoover Dam, and its new wealth let it lay down another great aqueduct and still another. And in the 1960s, when the metropolitan population began to rival New York’s, that same unquenchable thirst, that same implacable ambition and wealth made the city look to the rivers of Northern California, importing more water over an improbable distance of 444 miles and an impossible altitude--the summit of the Tehachapi range--of 3,000 feet.

But what will Los Angeles do if a great earthquake severs an aqueduct or pinches off a tunnel? It could lose water for millions in a minute and a half. And where will it go for more water? The city easily overcame opposition in the Owens Valley, among the other Colorado River states and then in Northern California. But when the city carried its buckets north in the early ‘80s, during the Peripheral Canal wars, it came back with nothing. That defeat was the most significant in its history. If Los Angeles can neither stop growth nor find a new source of water, what will it do?

We have become used to seeing things in this state as north versus south, as if that political demarcation, grounded in wars over water, were more unyielding than the Berlin Wall. It is not. Los Angeles accounts for roughly half of the modern California economy but uses less than 10% of the water; northern urbanites are another third of the wealth and use even less. Agriculture, the south’s erstwhile ally in the water wars, uses nearly 40 times more water than Los Angeles does and represents less than 3% of the state’s annual production of wealth. L.A. consumes less water, for all its swimming pools and showers and tropical lawns, than agriculture uses to grow grass to feed cows.

The farmers’ battle cry is “No More Owens Valleys!” And there need be none. But the new Romans have become scavengers; the great engineering dreams of the recent past--aqueducts to Oregon and Canada--seem more impossible with each passing day. So L.A. will ultimately look to agricultural water if it wishes to continue to grow.

But that is another battle in a future time. For now, glory in your aqueduct, Los Angeles; you’ll not see another like it anywhere.