Booster Hype & The Water Wars

JUST AFTER last week's rains, I happened upon this item while skimming a relatively new website called, Hidden L.A.:

"Since the 1880's L.A. boosters would use 7 year weather charts to advertise
heavy rain for agriculture inverters and low rain for business / residential
immigration in wintertime. Chamber of Commerce hired ad men to work it both
ways. Real Estate has always been L.A.'s heart beat I guess."

Boosters. Of course. Wrangling. Altering the story to fit their needs. This brought me back to some key L.A. history: Of all of the elements, fire and water, serve a crucial -- and recurring -- role in the story of Los Angeles. The water struggle stretches way back, but the root of the L.A. Water Wars can be pin-pointed to the late 1800s. In 1898, Fredrick Eaton was elected mayor of the city of Los Angeles and tapped his friend, William Mulholland (yes, that Mullholland, after which the hair--raising, grand-sweep of road was named) to head the newly-created Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Eaton had big plans for Los Angeles.-- but the city was still essentially a desert. That status -- and the city's limited water supply -- curtailed its growth. Mullholland's idea (with Eaton's blessing) was to tap into the runoff from the Sierra Nevada, which flowed through the Owens Valley. A gravity-fed aqueduct could deliver the Owens water to Los Angeles. What about Owen's Valley? Well, that's where "wars" enters the equation. The ensuing battles over water-rights lasted for years (and became the subject of many newspaper reports, stump speeches, books and, decades later, the Academy Award-winning film "Chinatown," written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski.

Initially, the U.S. government had planed on building an irrigation system to assist Owens Valley farmers. But Eaton had well-placed friends in the federal government and consequently slipped through various loopholes: He bought land as a private citizen, hoping to sell it back to Los Angeles at a profit; he lobbied the president, Theodore Roosevelt, who cancelled the initial irrigation plans.
Completed in 1913, the aqueduct spanned 223 miles of canals and required than 2,000 men who dug more than 100 tunnels. At the ceremony celebrating its unveiling, Mulholland spoke his now famous words about this engineering feat: "There it is. Take it."
And they did. The San Fernando investors demanded so much water from the Owens Valley that it started to transform from what many called "The Switzerland of California" into a desert, causing the area to completely dry up by 1924. Owens Valley farmers attempted to sell water rights to Los Angeles as a group, but were thwarted by L.A. big-business which managed to buy the water rights at a substantially reduced price.
There were protests, rebellions, but history had already carved out its path. Before 1930, L.A. owned 90% of the water in Owens Valley leaving the agriculture business in the valley dead. It was only the beginning -- once again, altering and embellishing L.A.'s story.

top photo, caption: Opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, November 5, 1913,
credit California Historical Society

video clip: via YouTube
bottom photo, caption: The Construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
credit: California Historical Society

-- L.G.