Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [48]
What was odd about this was that there was as yet no guarantee—at least none publicly offered by Mulholland—that the San Fernando Valley was going to receive any of the Owens Valley water. In the first place, the route of the aqueduct had not yet been disclosed; it might go through the valley, but then again it might not. Secondly, the voters had not even approved the aqueduct, let alone voted for a bond issue to finance it. Mulholland had been saying that the city had surplus water sufficient for only ten thousand new arrivals. If that was so, and if the city was expected to grow by hundreds of thousands during the next decade, where was this great surplus for the San Fernando Valley to come from? In those days, the valley was isolated from Los Angeles proper; it sat by itself far outside the city limits. In theory, the valley couldn’t even have the city’s surplus water, assuming there was any—it would be against the law.
The truth, which only a handful of people knew, was that William Mulholland’s private figures were grossly at odds with his public pronouncements; it was the same with his intentions. Despite his talk of water for only ten thousand more people, there was still a big surplus at hand. (During the eight years it would take to complete the aqueduct, in fact, the population of Los Angeles rose from 200,000 to 500,000 people, yet no water crisis occurred.) The crisis was, in large part, a manufactured one, created to instill the public with a sense of panic and help Eaton acquire a maximum number of water rights in the Owens Valley. Mulholland and Eaton had managed to secure water rights along forty miles of the Owens River, which would be enough to give the city a huge surplus for years to come. But Mulholland was not saying that he would use any of the surplus; in fact, he seemed to be going out of his way to assure the Owens Valley that he would not. For example, the proposed intake for the aqueduct had been carefully located downstream from most of the Owens valley ranches and farms, so that they could continue to irrigate; Mulholland would later tell the valley people that his objective was simply to divert their unused and return flows.
In truth, Mulholland planned to divert every drop to which the city held rights as soon as he could. Like all water-conscious westerners, he lived in fear of the use-it-or-lose-it principle in the doctrine of appropriative rights. If the city held water rights that went unused for years, the Owens Valley people might successfully claim them back. But where would he allow the surplus to be used?
Privately, Mulholland planned to lead the aqueduct through the San Fernando Valley on its way to the city. In his hydrologic scheme of things, the valley was the best possible receiving basin; any water dumped on the earth there would automatically drain into the Los Angeles River and its broad aquifer, creating a large, convenient, non-evaporative pool for the city to tap. It provided, in a word, free storage. That it was free was critically important, because Mulholland, intentionally or not, had underestimated the cost of building the aqueduct, and to build a large storage reservoir in addition to the aqueduct would be out of the question financially. Even had it been feasible, Mulholland was deeply offended by the evaporative waste of reservoirs; he was much more inclined to