Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [66]
The city took full responsibility for all losses and paid most of the claims without contest, which cost it close to $15 million. For much less than that, Mulholland not only could have bought the Long Valley site, but built the dam, too.
In the ensuing months, in hearing after hearing, Mulholland was dragged through an agonizing reappraisal of his career. It was learned that two other dams in whose design and construction he participated as a consultant eventually collapsed, and a third had to be abandoned when partially built. He was a bold engineer, an innovative engineer; he was also a reckless, arrogant, and inexcusably careless engineer. His fall from grace was slow, awful, and complete. By the time he wearily resigned, in November of 1928, at the age of seventy-three, his reputation was sullied beyond redemption. His wit and his combativeness vanished in retirement, and even in the company of his perfervidly loyal children he often lacked the energy to speak. He told them, “The zest for living is gone.”
The city finally settled with Fred Eaton, who lost almost everything in the collapse of the Watterson banks, for $650,000. A few weeks later, the two old and broken men moved to heal their twenty-year rift. Lost in despondency at home, Mulholland received a message that Eaton, who had since returned to Los Angeles, would like to see him. Without a word, he got his hat and strode out the door. Eaton had suffered a stroke; he needed a cane to walk, and he looked ancient. “Hello, Fred,” said Mulholland as he approached Eaton’s bedside. Then both of them broke down and wept.
The dam in Long Valley was ultimately built, and the reservoir that formed behind it, which was named Lake Crowley in honor of a priest who devoted the latter part of his life to healing the rift between city and valley, was, in its day, one of the largest in the country. By then, however, all hope of fruitful coexistence had died. On a map, the Owens Valley was still there, but it had ceased to exist as a place with its own aspirations, its own destiny. By the mid-1930s, Los Angeles was landlord of 95 percent of the farmland and 85 percent of the property in the towns. In the town of Independence, the Eastern California Museum, which tells the story of the battle largely from the valley’s side, sits on land leased from the city.
Los Angeles leased some of the land back to farmers for a while, but the unpredictability of the water supply discouraged most of those who tried to carry on. There might be enough for twenty or thirty thousand acres in wetter years; then there might be enough for only three or four thousand. As the city grew, the river became utterly appropriated; when that happened, the Department of Water and Power sank wells and began depauperating the aquifer, as would happen—as is happening—in so many places in the West. The last of the ranchers quit in the 1950s and the economy shifted to tourism; most of those who remain now pump gas, rent rooms, or serve lunch to the skiers and tourists driving through on Highway 395. By the 1970s, even that tenuous existence was threatened; the aquifer was so drawn-down that desert plants which can normally survive on the meagerest capillary action of groundwater began to die, and the valley went beyond desert and took on the appearance of the Bonneville Salt Flats. When the winds of convection blow, huge clouds of alkaline dust boil off the valley floor; people now live in the Owens Valley at some risk to their health. The city has refused every request that it limit its groundwater pumping, just as it has refused to stop diverting the creeks that feed Mono Lake to the north—another casualty of its unquenchable thirst. Some sporadic dynamitings