California water wars: A century of wrangling over Los Angeles's water

Al Jazeera

07-03-2025

Just before midnight on March 7, 1928, the St Francis Dam, located roughly 80km (50 miles) inland of Los Angeles, collapsed. There were no witnesses to the disaster – or none who survived – but investigators later determined that the 56-metre-tall (184ft-) barrier fell all at once, sending 12.4 billion gallons of water surging down the San Francisquito Canyon in a wave 43 metres (141ft) high.
Five hours later, the waters finally dumped into the Pacific Ocean, leaving chunks of concrete in their wake as heavy as 10,000 tonnes. By then, the gush of water was nearly 3km (2 miles) wide, laying waste to several towns along the way, cutting power throughout the region, and ultimately killing at least 431 people, many of whom were washed out to sea, their remains found as late as 1994 and as far as the Mexican border.
The dam had been marred by cracks and leaks ever since its reservoir began filling with water in 1926, but its builders deemed such issues inconsequential and continued to fill as planned. The water it contained – extracted amid much contention from Owens Valley, a lush oasis in a desert region between the Sierra Nevada and White Mountains some 320km (200 miles) to the north – was needed to provide for Los Angeles's rapidly growing population.
Over the next two years, new cracks formed and seepage became increasingly apparent around the abutments where the dam met the sides of San Francisquito Canyon. By February 1928, large leaks were releasing so much water that farmers in the area began to worry. Again, the dam's chief engineer – William Mulholland – declared it was normal.
On the morning of its collapse, Mulholland and his colleagues had conducted a thorough inspection of the dam, determining even then that it was safe but in need of future repairs. Hours later, the waters burst through it. An investigation would later conclude the breach was due to 'defective foundations'.
It was the largest American civil engineering disaster of the century – a byproduct of western expansion and the struggle known as the California Water Wars, which pitted the public against private business interests and set the stage for a century of conflict over the state's most contested resource.
'We are going to turn that country dry'
Water is still a major issue for California nearly 100 years later. During the fires that ravaged Los Angeles in January 2025, firefighters' ability to battle the blazes was hampered by low hydrant water pressure. Investigators said this was caused by unusually high demand driven by firefighting efforts, while then-President-elect Donald Trump blamed state Governor Gavin Newsom, claiming the water shortage was due to 'overregulation' – referring mostly to regulations designed to protect endangered species in the surrounding areas.
In recent interviews with firefighters, Al Jazeera was told the difficulty in obtaining enough water to fight the fires was likely unavoidable.
'There's no urban municipal water system that could support that,' said Bobbie Scopa, who spent nearly 45 years as a firefighter. 'You're going to run out of water, no matter what. It's not that uncommon. It happens when there's large fires.'
While water shortage is certainly a valid concern as California faces historic droughts, it turns out the most pressing issues surrounding the Los Angeles water system may have less to do with lack of water than where it's ending up, with residents going without as big agriculture and water investors extract or privatise what short supply there is. According to studies by the University of Southern California, just 10 percent of state water goes to residents, while the bulk – 80 percent – is used for irrigating crops.
This dynamic is a continuation of a series of events that dates back to the water system's creation a century ago, which instigated a pattern of resource theft, political corruption and ultimately death due to the collapse of the dam. The result: An uncertain future in which vulnerable residents are increasingly parched by powerful business interests.
'The history of California in the twentieth century is the story of a state inventing itself with water,' wrote William L Kahrl in Water and Power: The Conflict Over Los Angeles Water Supply in the Owens Valley, published in 1982 and widely considered the definitive text on the matter. Kahrl's brick of a book relates in fine detail the complex events that brought water to the city by drawing it from Owens Valley via a 375km (233-mile) aqueduct that is still in use, allowing the former to flourish at the expense of the latter, and prompting the sometimes violent conflict.
Long before notoriously dry Southern California was populated by Americans pushing 19th-century western expansion, the native Paiute peoples had been the first to irrigate Owens Valley whenever droughts arose between bouts of seasonal migration. As settlers arrived from the east, it was suggested that the Owens region could one day be a reservation for the Paiute. But after the Los Angeles aqueduct was built to funnel water from the valley to the rapidly expanding city to the south, the tribe was among the hardest hit when the valley's water eventually ran out and its economy deteriorated.
'Do not go to Inyo County,' William Mulholland – who would one day direct the disastrous St Francis Dam project as part of the huge aqueduct infrastructure – warned an associate in the early days of the aqueduct effort, referring to the county containing Owens Valley. 'We are going to turn that country dry.'
A rapidly expanding city
According to Kahrl, 'No other individual has had so much to do with the creation of the modern metropolis of Los Angeles' than Mulholland. Today, you see his name all over the city, most notably on signs indicating Mulholland Drive. And though he became one of the most influential figures in California history, he came from humble beginnings.
Born in Belfast, Ireland, Mulholland joined the British Merchant Navy at the age of 15, arriving in Los Angeles in 1877 (when the population was just about 11,000) at the age of 22, whereupon he was hired as a ditch digger for the Los Angeles City Water Company by superintendent Fred Eaton. The two became fast friends, and when Eaton – who held aspirations for power and wealth – resigned from the company in 1886 to pursue a political career, he appointed Mulholland, who had by then worked his way up the ranks, as his successor.
In 1898, Eaton was elected mayor of Los Angeles largely on promises to bring water to the city, which was growing fast and had by then exploded to a population of about 100,000. The following year, voters approved a bond for the city to purchase the Los Angeles City Water Company, and in 1902, it was municipalised and renamed the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP).
Initially, city planners were reluctant to retain Mulholland as the head of the department due to his lack of leadership experience, but they soon realised that they had no choice as he had designed and constructed the city's water infrastructure system over the preceding two decades without putting it down on paper. 'All of this information – the size of every inch of pipe, the age and location of every valve – Mulholland carried in his head,' wrote Kahrl.
Mulholland had developed a strong affinity for his adopted home of Los Angeles and had a vision for its growth – and how he could become rich in the process. Within a few years, he began a campaign to import water to the city to bolster local aquifers, making exaggerated prognostications about an imminent water crisis.
'If Los Angeles runs out of water for one week,' said Mulholland, 'the city within a year will not have a population of 100,000 people.' At the time, Los Angeles's population was well past that and already heading towards 300,000 within a few years.
Experts have since judged these claims rather dubious, but in any event, the city began looking for relatively nearby water resources. Fred Eaton had long been eying Owens Valley for this very purpose.
'Sell out – or dry out'
Owens Valley and the 285 square-kilometre (110 square-mile) lake it contained – 'a tiny island of green in the middle of a wasteland' – was considered a prime candidate for extraction not only due to its abundance of water, but because its 4,000-foot (1.2km) elevation would send the water racing down an aqueduct all the way to Los Angeles without the need for electric pumping. But unfortunately for Eaton and Mulholland, this was complicated by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which was already in the process of irrigating the valley for local farmers using the very water the men hoped to acquire.
At first it seemed like their plans had been thwarted, but then Eaton made a deal with the regional engineer in charge of the Bureau's project, an old friend of his named Joseph Lippincott. Eaton hired Lippincott as a consultant for Los Angeles – doubling his salary from the federal government – in exchange for a role for himself as a consultant on the Owens irrigation project. Through this arrangement, Eaton gathered the information about local land ownership he would need to obtain the valley's water rights.
Over the coming years, Eaton and Mulholland began privately buying up property from ranchers throughout Owens Valley – its population roughly 4,000 – and turning the water rights from those properties over to Los Angeles.
While many were reluctant to sell, Mulholland coerced some into doing so by falsely asserting that the Reclamation Service was about to end the irrigation project, and that their only option was to 'sell out or dry out'. Soon LA owned 90 percent of the valley's water, and the Bureau could no longer continue its efforts had it even wanted to.
Water secured, the LADWP now needed the funds to construct the aqueduct to transport it – a project which would eventually cost $23m – the equivalent of $626 million today – but this would require a bond that, this time, lacked voter support.
So in 1905, Mulholland ordered that the LADWP start dumping water reserves into the ocean, the sudden drop in supply allowing him to claim a dire shortage. When word of these actions leaked, he falsely asserted that it was all part of a normal process of clearing runoff. This conspiracy was fictionalised in the 1974 film Chinatown, though the film was set later, in the 1930s, and Mullholland's movie stand-in, Hollis Mulwray, is portrayed in a more sympathetic light as he opposes the construction of a new dam, arguing that he wouldn't repeat his previous, deadly mistake – a reference to the St Francis Dam catastrophe.
In any case, the ruse worked, the citizens of Los Angeles were convinced their access to water was at risk, and the city passed the bond. The construction of the aqueduct overran costs, however, and the city charter forbade borrowing the additional money needed as it stated the city couldn't hold a debt greater than 15 percent of its own value, determined by factors like size and population. This inspired the next phase of Mullholland's scheme and allowed him to solve two problems at once.
In addition to money, the city now also needed water storage facilities, and Mulholland set his sights on the adjacent San Fernando Valley aquifer where water could be stored. But here, again, the charter got in the way as it banned Los Angeles's water from being sold, leased or otherwise used outside the city.
So, Mulholland pushed for the valley's annexation, which would not only provide for water storage, but would also increase the size and valuation of the city, raising its debt limit so that more could be borrowed to complete the aqueduct. Valley residents voted in favour of joining the city after much lobbying from Mulholland and his associates.
Simultaneously, a group of investors associated with Mulholland and Eaton were purchasing land throughout the valley with the foreknowledge that it would become profitable, irrigated LA real estate. Later known as the San Fernando Land Syndicate, the group included the publisher of The Los Angeles Times, Harrison Otis, who would repeatedly leverage his paper to Eaton and Mulholland's disinformation ends.
Construction of the aqueduct began in 1908 and finished in 1913. At the opening ceremony, Mulholland pointed at the water as it began to flow and told the mayor, 'There it is – take it.'
The California Water Wars
Owens Lake was ultimately dried out entirely between 1913 and 1934, but not before dramatic, sometimes violent pushback from residents.
'It was highly acrimonious at the time because it was one of the first [modern] major water transfers,' explains Andrew Ayers, professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California's Water Policy Center. With little legal precedent, he says, 'people had to muddle their way through it'.
The ranchers of Owens Valley – the population of which had grown to about 7,000 but would soon begin decades of decline – did their muddling via dynamite attacks on the aqueduct.
According to Kahrl, Mulholland 'consistently failed to appreciate the depth of the anger his policies were creating…. Night riders now plied the back roads of Inyo, preying upon the aqueduct' with explosives and threatening anyone suspected of being associated with the LADWP.
The high point of these attacks came on November 1, 1924, when a group of angry farmers blew up the aqueduct's emergency spillway in the Alabama Hills, allowing all the water to flow back into the valley. These escapades were fictionalised in the 1939 movie New Frontiers, in which John Wayne leads the charge against the villainous water barons.
The Los Angeles Times – whose publisher had much to gain financially from the aqueduct that would enrich the San Fernando Valley – declared that the conflict represented 'the forces of law and order against Socialism – peace and prosperity against misery and chaos – the Stars and Stripes against the red flag'.
While some of the rebellious ranchers acted alone, others were organised and funded by Owens Valley businessmen Wilfred and Mark Watterson, who owned the Inyo County Bank. But suddenly in August 1927, the bank collapsed, wiping out the life savings of many locals.
When the Wattersons admitted to using the money to fund the fight against Los Angeles, they were charged with 36 counts of embezzlement and grand theft totalling exactly $450,000.27 (more than $8.2m in today's money). The Los Angeles Times denounced the brothers as 'mobsters' and made false claims about their ties to the Ku Klux Klan, but at their trial they were greeted by hundreds of cheering farmers.
'As the district attorney presented his closing argument, he broke into tears, and the judge and jury wept with him,' wrote Kahrl. The Wattersons – sentenced to 10 years in prison – received the only criminal penalties for the water uprising.
The court ruling effectively brought about an end to the conflict. With the lake now completely dry, the lush local land previously used for agriculture turned brown and the economy in Owens Valley was devastated, afflicting the Paiute peoples – who had long called it home – in particular.
Owens Valley went on to become the nation's biggest source of dust pollution. After the US built a Japanese internment camp there during the Second World War as part of a wider effort to suppress sabotage in the wake of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, one internee later remembered: 'We slept in the dust; we breathed the dust; and we ate the dust.'
Somewhere along the way, Mulholland had a falling out with Eaton when the latter wouldn't sell a piece of property the former wanted for a reservoir. So Mulholland went on to spend several years and $1.3m (paid for by yet another municipal bond) building the doomed St Francis Dam. Later, it would be reported by its construction workers that 'the accent was heavy on the urge to overcome obstacles and accomplish results' with little attention given to safety.
After the dam's collapse, a jury found that Mulholland was not criminally culpable, but he accepted full responsibility for the tragedy and was not shy about expressing his guilt. 'I envy the dead,' he told the county coroner.
He resigned and retired in disgrace, living out his life in seclusion and dying in Los Angeles in 1935.
The water wars continue
The state's struggle over water was still far from over, however.
'Water is a critical resource in the American West,' says Ayers. 'It's very easy to fall into a situation where controversy and conflict become not only the dominating narratives but the dominating modes of operating, and finding ways to avoid that and stoke cooperation and collaboration pay big dividends.'
But in the century that followed the California Water Wars, conflict over the region's water has continued. Today, the Los Angeles Aqueduct provides about a third of the city's imported water, with the rest coming from the Colorado River and other sources throughout California.
'There are conflicting interests within the delta,' says Ayers, referring to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta that serves much of the region's water. 'When we move large amounts of water from the wetter north down to the drier south, how that system is managed has implications for a lot of different players.'
In recent decades, those interests have placed homeowners throughout the region at odds with large-scale producers of water-thirsty crops like almonds, oranges and pomegranates. Those living alongside and sharing wells with such farms frequently report low pressure or even a complete lack of water as dwindling supplies are diverted to irrigate the agricultural industry. Not only do many homeowners end up living entirely without a running source, but they find it impossible to sell their now-waterless homes.
These latest water conflicts have largely been driven by a 1994 deregulation agreement known as the Monterey Plus Amendments. This pact – forged behind closed doors between the California Department of Water Resources and several water contractors – transferred ownership of public water supplies in Kern Country east of Los Angeles to the Kern Water Bank Authority, an entity controlled by agribusiness interests. Since then, a growing industry of private water banks has developed, allowing their owners to control pricing and access, forcing residents in vulnerable areas to pay more while others have seen their water supplies drained entirely.
After 20 years of outcry over the situation, California passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014 with the intention of achieving a sustainable water system by 2042. The act affords local water agencies greater control over their groundwater basins while requiring that they create and implement plans for preventing excessive use and other undesirable impacts like ground subsidence. Public water advocates, however, argue that such measures are too little too late, citing the already incipient crisis, and the ongoing practice of private water ownership.