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By Root 1688 0

way from northern California to Los Angeles would, of course, pass right through the San Joaquin Valley. With its meager and erratic rainfall, Los Angeles had always been haunted by drought; the thought of more water always set off a Pavlovian response. On the other hand, the metropolitan region didn’t really need the water. The city of Los Angeles proper was getting virtually all its needs fulfilled by its Owens River Aqueduct, and its countless suburbs, together with San Diego, had recently gotten the first of their 550,000-acre-foot entitlement from the Colorado River. By the early 1950s, Los Angeles was extending its aqueduct into Mono Basin, where it planned to divert the streams tumbling out of Yosemite that feed Mono Lake. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Water District, the areawide water imperium serving most of southern California, was already planning a second aqueduct to the Colorado River, which would double that supply. (This was water that southern California planned to “borrow” from Arizona’s entitlement for as long as Arizona—stymied by southern California’s Congressional delegation—was unable to build the Central Arizona Project.) Six million new people could settle in southern California before a water famine developed.

What made matters worse was that in order to deliver northern California water to Los Angeles, you would have to contend with the Tehachapi Mountains, which separate southern California from the San Joaquin Valley. Either you had to tunnel through that brutish, barren summit, or you had to pump the water up and over, two-thirds of a vertical mile. Since the Tehachapis sit on two major active earthquake faults, the Garlock and the San Andreas, tunneling would be risky. An earthquake could crush the aqueduct inside the mountains and shut off the water for months or years. That meant you would have to pump the water uphill, and the energy requirements would simply be awesome.

Why, then, would Los Angeles, which had most of its water arriving entirely by gravity from the Owens River, and the rest of the South Coast region, which got its water pumped by subsidized electricity from Hoover Dam, vote for a project that would sell them expensive water they wouldn’t need for decades?

There were two possible reasons. One was Arizona’s lawsuit against California over its Colorado River entitlement. If California lost, and the Central Arizona Project was built, southern California would have to forfeit a vast quantity of water, on whose promise much of its expected growth was based—water enough for three million people. With such stakes, its smug confidence that it would win the lawsuit had to be at least somewhat shaky.

The other reason southern California might go along was simply that opportunities to find water did not arise every year. Ten or twenty years would be required to complete the project; by the time it was finished, if the region continued its spellbinding growth, there would be millions of new people there. Los Angeles was growing so fast that it might not want to pass up any opportunity to find more water—whether it made good sense or not.

If one thought about it this way, and thought about it long enough, it all began to seem inevitable. Los Angeles would resist, it would drag its feet and fret, but once the project began to roll through the legislature it would climb aboard. Since southern California was, financially speaking, the key to the whole plan, it simply had to be dragged along. Southern California would sign on—out of fear, out of simple ignorance if nothing else. And southern Californians would get some of the water. But not too much.

During the winter of 1955, California was hit by the biggest floods since the monumental deluges of 1861 and 1862. After weeks of almost continuous rain, the rivers of the Sierra Nevada and the North Coast were tumultuous. The Eel River in the coastal mountains, which nearly dries up during the late summer and fall, was carrying the flow of the Yukon, the St. Lawrence, and the Missouri combined. The flood that spilled out of the mouth