[L]wAter

LA–it is a city established on the desert coast of California, with few local sources besides the seasonal flows of the Los Angeles and Santa Ana Rivers. Near the turn of the twentieth-century, with a dry climate and ambitious plans, city officials helped pioneer the modern “hydrological civilization” of the Southwest. This began first in 1913 with the building of the Los Angeles aqueduct, a municipal construction of unprecedented size and extreme controversy. Stretching over 200 miles to the north where it drained the waters from rural communities of the Owens Valley, it was bitterly opposed and, at one point, dynamited by desperate upstream farmers. Several years later, this was followed by the Colorado River aqueduct, built in 1939. Although conceived primarily to acquire water for Los Angeles, it now helps deliver water also for San Diego and the many other urban inhabitants across Southern California. The final stage in the state’s massive water infrastructure was the construction, beginning in 1960, of the State Water Project. The Project boasts over 700 miles of canals and pipelines, siphoning from the water-rich estuary of the northern San Joaquin Delta to the parched central and southern portions of the state (“California State Water Project” 2011). The building of the project, which was strongly opposed by San Francisco and other communities of northern California, came about largely due to the power and influence of Los Angeles, with its many residents providing the votes and political will to make the construction possible (Hundley 2001; Rarick 2006).

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