Wednesday January 22, 2025
History —
On July 29, 1905, the lead story in the Los Angeles Daily Times announced the city’s purchase of land and water rights in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and an ambitious plan to pipe fresh mountain water 250 miles to a thirsty Los Angeles.
“This new water supply, immense and unfailing, will make Los Angeles forge ahead by leaps and bounds, and remove every spectra of drought or doubt,” wrote the Times. “With such an enormous stream of the purest mountain water pouring in here, Los Angeles will have one of the best supplies in the land… she will have assured her future for a century.”
When the Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed in 1913, it was celebrated as an engineering marvel, and its creator, Los Angeles water superintendent William Mulholland, was hailed as a hero. With tens of millions of gallons of freshwater flowing into the city each day, Los Angeles surged from a frontier outpost of 200,000 to a sprawling metropolis of more than a million in less than 20 years.
But to some, Mulholland wasn’t a hero, but a thief. In the Owens Valley, the source of Los Angeles’s water, lakes and irrigation canals dried up as the city diverted more and more water to feed its growth.