Building the Los Angeles Aqueduct

The Mono Lake case reached court in the early 1980s, but the crisis that led to the case began almost a century earlier, when the city of Los Angeles first began to run out of water. Moving water to Los Angeles, California’s most populous and economically dynamic city, has been a state priority since the turn of the 20 th century. This chapter explores the water struggles that led to the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and ultimately to the Mono Lake litigation. It reviews the history of water exports from the Owens Valley in the early 1900s and the devastating effects on the local community and ecology – prompting the decline of its once thriving agricultural economy (and an open rebellion by Owens Valley farmers). It then recounts the St. Francis Dam disaster of 1928, which terrified the population and tempered judgements about the safety risks of large-scale water projects near population centers, further prompting water speculation in more remote areas of the state. The sobering loss of life in that infamous disaster testifies to the high stakes involved in managing water scarcity dilemmas that continue to bedevil California and arid regions throughout the world.