The City of Los Angeles stole their water 93 years ago. Yesterday, with the turn of a valve, huge amounts of water will now flow back into the Owens Valley, and this area, which had become a dust bowl, will now begin to be restored to what it had been.
The court battles to make this happen took a long time, and the City of L.A. fought it every inch of the way, until a judge mandated they act. The politics of water are perhaps the most brass-knuckled in all of the southwest.
This tidbit.
The two Los Angeles aqueducts deliver about 430 million gallons a day to the city.
Virtually all the water for southern California, including L.A. and Orange County, is piped in from hundreds of miles away, mostly from the Sacramento delta and the Colorado River, which seems a quite mad and unsustainable system, doesn’t it?
Owens Valley is dry, true, but I never considered it a dust bowl. I haven’t lived in California in years but back when I would frequent the 395 in the summer months, I always found its immense scorched plains amazingly tranquil and picturesque especially backdropped by the Sierra and the White Mountains. In a way that the central valley is not tranquil or picturesque at all. I’m afraid bringing water back to the Owens Valley will only lead to large areas of monocultured crops, in other words, big money toxic unsustainable agriculture. I hope I’m wrong.
I think there were parts of the Owens Valley that were described at dust bowl-like, that was one of the reasons they won the lawsuit.
Yes, I too like the desert surrounded by mountains, like in Joshua Tree National Park where you are in a scorched area with spectacular rock formations and you can see the 10,800 ft. Mount San Jacinto peak with snow on it.