Owens Lake: The Lake That Became a Dust Cloud

Twenty miles south of Lone Pine, beyond where Highway Three Ninety Five reaches Owens Lake, there is a place that does not look like what it was.

Owens Lake was once approximately one hundred seven square miles of shallow, saline water. It sat at the southern end of the Owens Valley, fed by the Owens River, and it was large enough to have supported a steamboat trade in the eighteen seventies and eighties. Nesting birds used its shores. It was not a dramatic lake, but it was there.

In nineteen thirteen, the Los Angeles Aqueduct diverted the Owens River. Without its inflow, the lake began to shrink. By the nineteen twenties, it was effectively gone: a dry white lakebed, a hundred and seven square miles of exposed alkaline sediment baking in the desert sun.

What the dried lakebed became was one of the largest sources of particulate air pollution in the United States. The sediment that the lake had deposited over millennia contains arsenic, chromium, cadmium, and other heavy metals. When the wind blows, which in the Owens Valley is often, that sediment becomes airborne. The Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District has documented dozens of days per year where dust from Owens Lake violates federal clean air standards. The communities downwind of the lakebed, including Keeler, on the lakebed's eastern shore, have lived with this for over a century.

Since the nineteen nineties, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has been legally required to fund dust suppression on the lakebed. The cost has run to hundreds of millions of dollars. The dust suppression infrastructure covers portions of the lakebed with shallow flooding and vegetation. It is an ongoing effort.

The price of the water that built Los Angeles is still being paid, in this valley, right now.