Water, The Audacity of California's Plumbing

California is a state of geographic contradiction. Two-thirds of its rain and snowfall lands in the northern third of the state. Two-thirds of its people and most of its farmland sit in the southern two-thirds.

The history of modern California is largely the story of engineering its way around that mismatch, at enormous scale and enormous cost. The first great move was local. In nineteen thirteen, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, engineered by William Mulholland, opened after five years of construction through two hundred thirty-three miles of desert, carrying water from the Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra.

Los Angeles had quietly bought up Owens Valley water rights for years. When the aqueduct opened, the valley's farmers were furious; some dynamited the channel multiple times in the nineteen twenties. The Owens Valley essentially dried up, and Los Angeles grew into a metropolis.

The Central Valley Project, a federal undertaking begun in the nineteen thirties and expanded through the forties, built Shasta Dam and a network of canals to deliver Sacramento River water to the San Joaquin Valley farms. The State Water Project, authorized by California voters in nineteen sixty, added the California Aqueduct: a canal about four hundred forty miles long that carries Sierra Nevada snowmelt south through the San Joaquin Valley and over the Tehachapi Mountains through the Edmonston Pumping Plant, the highest single lift pumping plant in the world, to Southern California. Today, California's water system moves more water farther than any comparable system on earth.

It supports fifty billion dollars a year in agricultural output and thirty-nine million people. It has also nearly killed the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem, reduced the once-great salmon runs of the Central Valley rivers to fractions of their historic size, and drained aquifers in the San Joaquin Valley so severely that the land itself is sinking, in some places more than a foot a year. The contradiction that the plumbing was built to solve has not gone away.

It has just moved.