Owens Valley Salty As Los Angeles Water Battle Flows Into Court

Owens Valley Salty As Los Angeles Water Battle Flows Into Court
by Kirk Siegler
NPR News



In the West, fights over water last a long time.

It's been almost 100 years since William Mulholland stood atop an aqueduct along the Owens River and said, "There it is, take it." He was referring to a diversion channel that started piping water to Los Angeles from 200 miles away. That water allowed L.A. to become the metropolis it is today.

But it also meant that the Owens River no longer flowed into the massive Owens Lake, which quickly dried up and became one of the biggest environmental disasters in the nation.

Now, Los Angeles is back in court over its obligations to control dust pollution at Owens Lake.

A Dried-Up Lake Turned Salt Flat

At the end of a bumpy road skirting the barren edge of the dry Owens Lake bed, highway signs become teachers about this harsh environment: that way to Furnace Creek, straight ahead to Stove Pipe Road, then Death Valley beyond. The wind has left small sand dunes on the road. Even in winter, the high desert sun is punishing, but you can see for miles.

And it's not hard to spot the white speck of Marty Adams' helicopter coming into view on the southern horizon. Owens Lake is four hours away from L.A., unless you have a chopper — then the journey takes about an hour and a half. Friendly, polished Adams is given an aerial tour of Owens Lake, near the Sierra Nevada Mountains, hundreds of times.

As director of water operations for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Adams oversees the complex system that collects snowmelt off the Sierra Nevada and carries it to water taps in the country's second largest city. But he's also in charge of dealing with the environmental consequences, and they're huge.

"People hear a 'dry lake,' and you might think it's a mountain lake, it's surrounded by trees," Adams says.

Instead, it's a salt flat the size of San Francisco, and when the wind blows, it can churn up huge dust storms with high levels of particulates that are dangerous to breathe. That earned Owens Lake the dubious mark of being the largest single source of dust pollution in the nation. And California law leaves no ambiguity for who the responsible polluter is.

Controlling The Dust

In the late 1990s, the city of L.A. reached a historic deal and agreed to a cleanup plan. To date, the city has spent more than a billion dollars doing that, giving it another distinction: It's one of the largest dust-control projects in U.S. history.

"And it's really trying to control dust in a desert that's naturally dusty," Adams says.

Those dust-control measures are easier to see once the chopper ascends higher. There are a few places where bulldozers have laid gravel. But it's mostly just giant, shallow pools of water that are still the weapons of choice to fight dust. And each day, the city pumps enough of it back onto the dry lake to fill the Rose Bowl. So Adams' agency has gone to federal court to make the case that they're done here.

"We believe that we've done everything that we've committed to do," he says. "At this point, we believe the job's done," Adams says.

'Simply About Money'

But not so fast, say California air quality regulators. Air Pollution Control District Director Ted Schade is in charge of monitoring air pollution in the area. He says the city is almost done with the cleanup, 90 percent of the plan has been met, and 45 square miles are controlled — so why stop now?

"The reason the city is not deploying the additional controls that are required to meet the standard is simply about money," Schade says.

When Schade took the job in 1990, the levels of particulate coming off Owens Lake were 100 times the standard the federal government says is safe to breathe. These tiny particulates are especially harmful because they're hard to detect, and can build up in the lungs over time and cause respiratory problems. Schade says things have gotten a lot better around the dry lake bed, but they're still not in the best shape.

The Owens Valley was a dusty place even before L.A.'s water diversions began. It's also a vast, sparsely populated place. But people here still have to live with the dust, and some still complain of allergies and other respiratory problems when the storms blow in and choke the valley.

"We're measuring dust levels 10 times higher than the standard, where no other desert areas in the West are seeing levels that high, so something is still wrong," Schade says. "It may have been a dusty place, but it wasn't this dusty."

A Environmental Justice Issue?

On a dirt road tucked off Highway 395, Mel Joseph climbs a ladder to the top of an air quality control monitor that he operates for the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone tribal community. These days, Joseph says, there are a lot fewer stage-one air alerts, but they still happen.

"It's an environmental justice issue as well for us, as to why our reservation is located 5 miles from the nation's largest source of particulate pollution," Joseph says.

He says the city of L.A. is still to blame for that pollution. Up and down the rural valley, there has been no love lost for the city's DWP since it began diverting water here 100 years ago.

"It's a desert climate, but they made it the dust bowl that it is today," Joseph says.

And this battle flows like many other water disputes in the arid West do — into the courts. They'll decide whether Los Angeles has done enough to control the dust bowl, or whether it'll have to spend millions of dollars more to finish the job.

A little background from Wikipedia

At the start of the 20th century, the United States Bureau of Reclamation was planning on building an irrigation system to help the farmers of the Owens Valley, which would block Los Angeles from diverting the water.[8]

Eaton and Mulholland used underhanded methods to obtain water rights and block the Bureau of Reclamation.[1]:62[2][8][11]:152 The regional engineer of the Bureau, Joseph Lippincott, was a close associate of Eaton,[1]:63 Eaton was a nominal agent for the Bureau through Lippincott, so Eaton had access to inside information about water rights and could recommend actions to the Bureau that would be beneficial to Los Angeles.[1]:64 In return, while Lippincott was employed by the Bureau, he also served as a paid private consultant to Eaton, advising Los Angeles on how to best obtain water rights.[1]:68

To help acquire water rights, Eaton posed as a cattle rancher, willing to overpay for land.[1]:66 Eaton bought land as a private citizen, hoping to sell it back to Los Angeles at a tidy profit.[12] Eaton claimed in an interview with the Los Angeles Express in 1905 that he turned over all his water rights to the City of Los Angeles without being paid for them, "except that I retained the cattle which I had been compelled to take in making the deals ... and mountain pasture land of no value except for grazing purposes."[13]

Mullholland also participated in misleading others. In Los Angeles, Mullholland influenced public opinion by dramatically understating the amount of water available for Los Angeles' growth.[1]:73 Mullholland also misled residents of the Owens Valley, by claiming that Los Angeles would take water only for domestic purposes, not for irrigation.[8]

In the end, between acquiring key water rights and lobbying Theodore Roosevelt, Eaton and Mullholand were able to cancel the Bureau's irrigation project.[6]

Many argue that Los Angeles paid an unfairly low price to the farmers of Owens Valley for their land.[14]:504 Gary Libecap of the University of California, Santa Barbara observed that the price that Los Angeles was willing to pay to other water sources per acre-foot of water was far higher what the farmers received.[15]:89 Farmers who resisted the pressure from Los Angeles until 1930 received the highest price for their land; most farmers sold their land from 1905 to 1925, and received less than Los Angeles was actually willing to pay.[15] However, the sale of their land brought the farmers substantially more income than if they had kept the land for farming and ranching.[15]:90 None of the sales were made under threat of eminent domain.[16]

The aqueduct was sold to the citizens of Los Angeles as vital to the growth of the city.[8] However, unknown to the public, the initial water would be used to irrigate the San Fernando Valley to the north, which was not at the time a part of the city.[8] A syndicate of investors (again, close friends of Eaton, including Harrison Gray Otis) bought up large tracts of land in the San Fernando Valley with this inside information.[8][12] This syndicate made substantial efforts to support passage of the bond issue that funded the aqueduct, including creating a false drought (by manipulating rainfall totals) and publishing scare articles in the Los Angeles Times, which Otis published.[8]

From 1908 through 1913, Mulholland directed the building of the aqueduct.[11] The 223 miles (359 km) Los Angeles Aqueduct, completed in November 1913, required more than 2,000 workers and the digging of 164 tunnels.[11] Mulholland's granddaughter has stated that the complexity of the project was comparable to the building of the Panama Canal.[17] Water from the Owens River reached a reservoir in the San Fernando Valley on November 5.[11] At a ceremony that day, Mulholland spoke his famous words about this engineering feat: "There it is. Take it."[11]

After the aqueduct was completed in 1913, the San Fernando investors demanded so much water from the Owens Valley that it started to transform from "The Switzerland of California" into a desert.[11] Mulholland was blocked from obtaining additional water from the Colorado River, so decided to take all available water from the Owens Valley.[1]:89.

In 1923, farmers and ranchers formed an irrigation cooperative to share costs. By exploiting personal bitterness of some of the farmers, Los Angeles managed to acquire some of the key water rights of the cooperative. By obtaining these rights, the cost of running the cooperative became too high, and the rest of the ranchers were forced to sell their water rights to Los Angeles.[1]:90 After obtaining these water rights, inflows to Owens Lake were almost completely diverted, which caused the lake to dry up by 1924.[18]

So much water was taken from the valley that, by 1924, the farmers and ranchers rebelled.[2] A series of provocations by Mullholland were, in turn, followed by corresponding threats from local farmers, and the destruction of Los Angeles property.[1]:93 Finally, a group of armed ranchers seized the Alabama Gates and dynamited part of the system, letting water return to the Owens River.[2]

The conflict was at its height when suddenly valley resistance was undermined, in early August of 1927, with the collapse of the Inyo County Bank. Wilfred and Mark Watterson had been Inyo County’s financial and civic leaders. Not only owners of the Inyo County Bank, the Wattersons were also businessmen themselves and the pair had organized valley residents into a unified opposition through the formation of an irrigation district. An audit of the bank revealed that the Wattersons were not only bankrupt, there were monumental shortages in both cash in the vault and amounts shown on the books. The two were indicted for embezzlement, and were later tried and convicted on thirty-six counts. All local business had been transacted through their bank, and the closure left merchants and customers with little more than the small amount of money they had on hand. The lifetime savings of many people, including in many cases, the entire payment gained from the sale of homes and ranches to the city, had been wiped out. In the face of the collapse of both resistance and the Owens Valley economy, the attacks on the aqueduct ceased. The city of Los Angeles sponsored a series of repair and maintenance programs for aqueduct facilities that stimulated some local employment and the Los Angeles water employees were paid a month in advance to bring some relief. But it was impossible to prevent one business after another from closing its doors.[19][20]

The City of Los Angeles also continued to purchase private land holdings and their water rights to meet the increasing demands. By 1928, Los Angeles owned 90 percent of the water in Owens Valley and agriculture interests in the region were effectively dead.[2]

I am against projects that affect the natural watershed, but what can be done now???

IMHO, large metro areas area the very worst thing for the environment as well as for social interaction. Look around, most problems we see are caused by these areas. Everything from skyrocketing violence to ecological disasters. We think we are doing good by allowing more people to exist and survive, but in reality we are doing the very worst thing possible. Natural cycles of life and death should be allowed to take place. Places like LA should never exist.

Basically it was the destruction of a natural resource so that the elite of our nation could live in comfortable weather. It is now those same elite that use their influence to convince us little guys that they and government know what is best for us.