Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [231]
At the south end of the Delta, the Clifton Court Forebay appeared below us—a receiving reservoir big as a Minnesota lake that rises and falls like the Bay of Fundy in rhythm with southern California’s thirst. A wide canal leads out of the forebay toward a rectangular building resembling the nonnuclear end of a very large nuclear power plant. The building houses the delta pumps—a battery of ten-thousand-horsepower machines that suck Feather River water thirty miles across the Delta before it can escape to sea, then lift it the first three hundred feet toward its ultimate thirty-four-hundred-foot rise over the Tehachapi Mountains. The water disappears inside and reappears thirty stories up the hill, at the beginning of the California Aqueduct. From overhead one could see the water spurting out of the siphons, each one wide enough to consume a freight car, as if shot from a water cannon. The aqueduct wound southward through the pale foothills, as level as a railroad grade, and disappeared in valley heat. It is 444 miles long, the longest river, if you can call it that, in California, and it is entirely man-made.
Interstate 5 parallels the aqueduct for two hundred fifty miles through the San Joaquin Valley. Not many years ago this was utterly barren land: it sprouted some patches of green during the winter, then lay dead during summer’s drought. Now it is a wide swath of cotton and orchards growing billions of new dollars in agricultural wealth. A hundred miles south of the Clifton Court Forebay the water arrives at San Luis Dam, now the ninth-largest dam in the world, a structure almost as immense as Oroville. What is bizarre about San Luis is that its basin, in the rain shadow of the Coast Range, is devoid of constant streams. Nearly all the water in the huge reservoir, eight miles across, is Feather River and Sacramento River water, pumped uphill. San Luis adds stability and security in a state inclined toward unpredictable weather and tectonic upheaval; in such a theater of disaster, a state utterly dependent on reservoirs needs to store its water in as many places as possible. The penalty for this added security is the giant jolt of electricity required to lift the water another three hundred feet. It is a Sisyphean lift, for the water comes right back down again when the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles call for more. You recapture some of the expended energy in turbines when you release it from San Luis, but the overall loss is around 33 percent. More than anyplace else, California seems determined to prove that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a lie.
This whole hydrologic ballet, this acrobatic rise and fall of mega-tonnages of water performed on a stage twice the length of Pennsylvania, is orchestrated by a silent choreographer in the Water Resources building in Sacramento: a Univac Series 904 computer punched and fed floppy disks by a team of programmers. At the south end of the valley, the aqueduct arrives at its moment of truth. The Sierra escarpment curves westward and the Coast Range bends eastward and they mate, producing a bastard offspring called the Transverse, or Tehachapi, Range. The Tehachapis stand between the water and Los Angeles, which sits in the ultramontane basin beyond.
The water is carried across the Tehachapis in five separate stages. The final, cyclopean one, which occurs at the A. D. Edmonston Pumping Plant, raises the water 1,926 feet—the Eiffel Tower atop the Empire State—in a single lift. To some engineers, the