Eastern California Museum to celebrate 80th birthday
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 19, 2008 at 6:59 am
From the Inyo Register:
This Saturday the public is invited to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Eastern California Museum in Independence. The museum and the Friends of the ECM will host a fundraising birthday celebration from 4-8 p.m. (the museum will open at 10 a.m., its regular weekend hours) featuring a silent auction, a raffle, a birthday cake, wine tasting, live music and refreshments. A $10 donation is suggested for those who want to enjoy the festivities and contribute to the Friends of the Museum.
The silent auction will start at 4 p.m. and probably get wrapped up about 7 p.m., giving attendees ample time to bid on the dozens of gifts, gift certificates and other goodies donated by local businesses, Klusmire said. The museum is located at 155 N. Grant St., in Independence, three blocks west of the historic county courthouse. For more information, call (760) 878-2625 or (760) 873-8583. According to Klusmire, the party will also celebrate the spirit of the
dozens of Inyo County residents who have put their passion for preserving local history to work for 80 years.
If you ever travel the 395 through the Owens Valley, this museum is definitely worth a stop! The staff is friendly and the collection is extensive, featuring Indian artifacts, a large Manzanar collection, and much, much more. There is a picture display about the Owens Valley Aqueduct, and outside there is a collection of old farm equipment, and even a few pieces of equipment used to build the aqueduct. After touring the museum, water buffs might want to travel north of town to see the intake for the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
Read more from Bishop’s Inyo Register by clicking here.
A short history of Metropolitan Water District
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 11, 2008 at 8:03 amFrom the O.C. Register:
Met is a spiritual descendent, if not a direct one, of William Mulholland and E.F. Scattergood, two turn-of-the-century empire builders who developed Los Angeles’ water and power. Mulholland was chief engineer for the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply and Scattergood was his counterpart at the Bureau of Power and Light.
Around 1920, after Mulholland’s department built the Los Angeles Aqueduct, providing enough water for not just LA but most of the Los Angeles basin, Scattergood’s agency began pushing for more hydroelectric power. Los Angeles applied to build a hydroelectric power plant at the future site of Hoover Dam – but voters defeated a bond that would have paid for it.
Then, suddenly, Mulholland started saying there wasn’t enough water. “Mulholland basically did a 180 degree turn,” said UC Berkeley economist and Aguanomics.com blogger David Zetland, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Met this year. “A year before he said we had enough water, which was still true in 1923.”
Zetland’s dissertation and the 1956 dissertation of a UCLA economics student named Jerome Milliman theorize that Mulholland changed his tune in order to shore up support for construction of the Hoover Dam.
Either way, Mulholland’s words were enough to garner public support for building the Colorado River Aqueduct, a massive project that could only be powered by something like the Hoover Dam. Los Angeles gained additional support and funding by proposing a new, regional agency that would control the aqueduct.
Read more of this historical retrospective on the Metropolitan Water District from the O.C. Register by clicking here.
Relics exposed in Lake Shasta; Hwy. 99 bridges, train trestles, town ruins emerge as water level drops
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 7, 2008 at 8:17 amFrom Redding’s Record Searchlight Online:
There’s more than just muddy flip-flops and busted lawn chairs emerging from the depths of Lake Shasta as the reservoir drops to its lowest levels in 16 years. Old bridges, train trestles, tunnels and the foundations from towns long-drowned have begun to pop out of the lake’s muddy depths.
One such relic from Shasta County’s pre-lake past even has taken on a new life. A bridge from Highway 99, the precursor to Interstate 5, was being used last week as a makeshift low-water boat ramp at Antlers Resort & Marina near Lakeshore Drive in Lakehead.
On Tuesday, Lavonne Coskinen of Garberville stood on the bridge, which once spanned the Sacramento River, with her three sisters waiting for a houseboat to arrive for the family’s annual reunion trip. She had no idea the half-submerged bridge under her feet was nearly 100 years old, and that once Model Ts rumbled back and forth across its deck. “It’s sad that the lake is so low,” she said. “But it makes it interesting to find all the stuff that’s come out of it, too.”
Read the rest of this article and check out the photo gallery in this article from Redding’s Record Searchlight Online by clicking here.
1877 drought teaches us to conserve
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 22, 2008 at 4:43 pmFrom the Bakersfield Californian:
The drought predicted this year is caused by three years of below average snowfall in the Sierras and scant rainfall the last couple of years. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a statewide drought emergency.
The most disastrous drought in California history occurred during the years of 1877-78. The Kern River dried up completely, but Bakersfield’s ground water supply furnished us with domestic water pumped by windmill or mule power. Most field crops relied on canal water from the river and were lost.
After only three years as county seat of Kern County, Bakersfield was just beginning to bloom. Three years after the Southern Pacific Railroad connected us with the rest of the United States, this drought must have been realized as a great setback for our community as well as the whole state.
With the new railroad connection, our bountiful produce could at last be shipped to national markets economically. Before the railroad, the cost of shipping to market by horse-drawn wagon was prohibitive.
During that era, Kern County’s major industry was livestock raising and the natural wild grasses were the lifeblood of this vast enterprise. Miller and Lux, Cox and Clark, Tracy and Canfield and the Crocker brothers all owned vast herds of cattle that relied on the natural grasses as feed and the river supplied their water.
There was hardly any rain in 1876 and none at all in 1877. No one had ever seen the Kern River completely dry until that year. Kern River Canyon was only a sun baked ditch filled with hot granite boulders. Buena Vista Lake and its sloughs were dry. The cattlemen banded together and dug deep wells about four miles apart in the Buena Vista Slough area and installed water pumps powered by mules to provide livestock water.
Read the full text of this story from the Bakersfield Californian by clicking here.
On this day in 1934, FDR asked Congress for massive drought relief
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 4, 2008 at 2:17 pmFrom Politico.com:
On this day in 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to appropriate $52.5 million to mitigate widespread suffering in the Midwest, brought on by severe droughts throughout much of the Great Plains.
The economic and social problems that came to the fore as the Dust Bowl in the 1930s actually began in the ’20s, triggered in part by poor land-management practices. The area, home to millions of American farm families, already faced difficult conditions in the wake of the Great Depression.
For days at a time, thick dust clouds all but blotted out the sun. Farm-related businesses, including banks, were forced to close, creating even more unemployment. Water supplies ran low after years of unabated droughts. As a consequence, many farmers abandoned their parched homesteads and headed to other parts of the country — notably California — in search of work.
Read the rest of this article from Politico.com by clicking here.
May 29, 1935: Hoover Dam set in concrete
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 28, 2008 at 11:00 pm
From Wired Magazine:
Hoover Dam was conceived in the early 1920s as a way of reclaiming California’s flood-prone Imperial Valley, improving water supply to the seven Colorado River-basin states, and generating electric power for Southern California, which was already growing rapidly.
Because the site chosen — on the Colorado River about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas — was adjacent to Boulder Canyon, the undertaking was christened the Boulder Canyon Dam Project.
It was a formidable project. At the time of its completion, Hoover Dam was the world’s largest concrete structure, a distinction it held until 1942 when the Grand Coulee Dam opened. It was also, at the time, the largest public-works program in U.S. history.
Check out that photo - that is the view of the upstream side of the dam before Lake Mead was there. You can see more historic photos of Hoover Dam by clicking on the picture. And you can read the full text of this article from Wired Magazine by clicking here.
Water wars are nothing new to California; column covers a segment of the history of the State Water Project
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on March 22, 2008 at 12:30 pmFrom the Sacramento Bee:
In today’s historical epistle, we provide some admittedly simplistic background for the current tussle over addressing California’s water woes:
Edmund G. “Pat” Brown probably wasn’t the most eloquent chief executive California has ever had. He’s the guy who, after touring a North Coast flood in 1964, exclaimed, “This is the worst disaster since I was elected governor.” Still, Brown succinctly defined the state’s water dilemma just after taking over as governor in 1959. “We do not have enough water when and where we need it,” he told legislators in unveiling what would become known as the State Water Project. “We have too much water when and where we don’t need it.”
Of course Brown wasn’t the first Californian to notice this problem, nor the first to try to resolve it.
More on this historical feature on the State Water Project by clicking here.
San Francisquito Dam failure: the Ventura County perspective
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on March 10, 2008 at 5:38 amFrom the Ventura County Star:
It is counted among the worst tragedies of its century. After a catastrophic failure of engineering, the water surged in the night without warning. Hundreds of people died. The old, the young and the poor suffered most. In the aftermath, looters struck. At their heels were hordes of lawyers hoping to cash in on the survivors.
You are correct if you think this aptly describes New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. But before New Orleans’ Katrina, there was Ventura County’s Katrina.
It happened 80 years ago this week when the St. Francis Dam gave way. Its failure at a few minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, unleashed a debris-swollen tsunami on an unsuspecting Piru, Fillmore, Santa Paula and Saticoy.
It was the worst man-made disaster of the 20th century, and it happened here. It was the second-worst catastrophe to strike California; only the 1906 San Francisco quake and the ensuing fires claimed more lives. Officially anyway. Many historians believe the death toll estimated at 500 for the St. Francis calamity excludes hundreds of Mexican migrant workers. But it was during the aftermath of these two American tragedies that the similarities cease. And that made all the difference for the victims.
In one respect, the St. Francis disaster also resembled the sinking of the Titanic. Both of these so-called engineering wonders failed spectacularly at their first testing.
The St. Francis Dam broke on the first day it had filled to capacity, according to John Nichols, who has curated an exhibit on the disaster that will open March 16 at the California Oil Museum in Santa Paula. The massive dam had something of a low profile. Few Santa Clara Valley residents apparently knew the dam existed before it failed. Built five miles from present-day Santa Clarita, the 185-foot-high structure was designed as a reservoir for the city of Los Angeles in case the flow of water from the Owens Valley was disrupted. Even the Ventura County supervisors became aware of the project only as the concrete walls were going up.
Read the full text of this article from the Ventura County Star by clicking here.
Remebering the San Francisquito Dam disaster 80 years later
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on March 8, 2008 at 6:51 amFrom the Santa Clarita Signal:
Nestled in the peaceful, rolling hills of San Francisquito Canyon is a power plant owned by the Department of Water and Power. There is little evidence of a day that once was anything but peaceful, as a historic disaster roughly one mile away from the power plant claimed approximately 450 lives in 1928.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clarita Valley will remember those who fell victim to what is considered the greatest civil engineering disaster in the 20th century. On March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam in the San Francisquito Canyon collapsed.
The concrete gravity-arch dam was built under the supervision of William Mulholland. The dam’s collapse, failure and subsequent flood killed approximately 450 people as waters rushed from the dam, through the Santa Clarita Valley and into Ventura County before connecting with the Pacific Ocean 54 miles away. The loss of life was the second worst in California history; the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire claimed more lives.
For Mulholland, who at the time was the chief engineer and general manager of the Bureau of Water Works and Supply (now the Department of Water & Power), the dam’s collapse ended his storied architectural career.
Read the rest of this retrospective of the San Francisquito Dam disaster in this detailed article from the Santa Clarita Signal by clicking here.
Recollections of the San Francis Dam disaster
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on March 5, 2008 at 6:35 amIt will be 80 years ago next week. From the Long Beach Press-Telegram:
It was 11:57 p.m. March 12, 1928, when the rumbling started.
The St. Francis Dam in San Francisquito Canyon, about 10 miles east of present-day Interstate 5 near Saugus, had given way, unleashing a 185-foot-high wall of water down the Santa Clara River and 54 miles to the sea.
“I looked out the window upstairs and there was that water coming in great big white waves,” Nazarene Eva Donlon, the daughter of an El Rio rancher, recalled years after the flood. “You could smell that water.”
The Donlon family was able to make it to higher ground. Others weren’t as fortunate.
Officials at the time estimated that the flood killed 450 people - including 20 entire families - although the death toll eventually topped 600 as more bodies were unearthed over the years.
The flood also washed away 1,240 homes and other buildings, inundated 23,500 acres of farmland and washed out four railroad bridges, eight miles of railroad track and untold miles of roads and highways, according to a committee set up immediately afterward to assess the damage.
Among the first to die were workers at two power-generating stations and Edison Co. employees and their families who lived in homes just below the dam.
To read the rest of this recollection in the Long Beach Press-Telegram, click here.
Looking back at the history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on February 21, 2008 at 10:58 pmFrom Westside Today, a retrospective article about how Mulholland brought water to Los Angeles:
Prior to 1913, the Los Angeles River was the primary source of water for our City of the Angels. In 1867 the privately owned City Water Company was awarded a 30-year contract to distribute river water efficiently. In 1878, the company hired a 23-year-old man to work as a zanjero, keeping the main water course from the river clear of trash and plant growth. He was an Irishman who didn’t have a formal education, but did have a deep love of learning and an abiding thirst for knowledge. His name was William Mulholland.
Mulholland learned engineering by reading and experience. He worked tirelessly in the field, leaving the desk work to others. He built an impressive reputation for himself in Los Angeles. He was known for his integrity and honesty.
You can read the rest of this article from Westside Today by clicking here.
Tulare Lake: Central California’s vanished lake
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on February 9, 2008 at 4:19 pmBefore the onset of irrigated agriculture in the mid 1800’s, the Central Valley was home to Tulare Lake. The lake’s level fluctuated from year to year, depending upon rainfall and snowfall conditions, but was generally considered the largest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes. But irrigated agriculture changed all that. From the Visalia Times-Delta:
Tulare Lake dried out completely for the first time in the summer of 1898. The generally accepted cause for the lake’s disappearance is the development of irrigation in the delta country of the Kaweah and Kings rivers, the historic lake’s two primary sources of water.
We are so familiar today with our irrigated agricultural landscape that it takes a moment to remember that it is a very recent development. Barely 150 years ago, only nature irrigated land in this part of California, and the great majority of the floor of the San Joaquin Valley consisted of either arid grasslands or alkali- and salt-tolerant, brushy scrubland.A wonderful book that doesn’t get nearly enough local attention describes the natural geography of the San Joaquin Valley and how humans have changed it over the past several centuries. If the natural world of Tulare County interests you, I strongly urge you to find a copy of William Preston’s “Vanishing Landscapes.”
Published in 1981, “Vanishing Landscapes” focuses on the San Joaquin Valley portions of Tulare and Kings counties, an area that once included Tulare Lake. The book does a superlative job of documenting the evolution of the region’s landscapes.
To read the full text of the article from the Visalia Times-Delta, click here.
A tale from San Diego’s desalination history
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on February 8, 2008 at 7:03 amFrom the San Diego Union-Tribune, a story about the time after the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion when Castro turned off the water to Guantanamo Bay. The solution came from San Diego. From the article:
They directed the president’s attention to something of which the White House may have been only dimly aware. To wit, Interior’s minuscule Office of Saline Water had been successfully desalting seawater for more than a year by processing it through a small demonstration plant it had built on Navy land near the tip of San Diego’s Point Loma. This operation was gratuitously contributing some 50,000 gallons a day to San Diego’s municipal water system.
But all this had been happening nearly 4,000 miles from where the cunning Castro was playing plumber in chief. Could a plant the size of Interior’s “demonstration” be disconnected, picked up and shipped virtually intact to a new home in the Caribbean?
Johnson hardly waited for anyone’s opinion on this. Piece by huge piece, the Point Loma contrivance was disassembled, each part tagged and loaded aboard freighters. In a matter of weeks, the “demonstration” plant was reassembled and producing – as it still does – a supply of fresh water to replace what we used to buy from Old What’s His Face [Castro].
To read the full text of this story from the San Diego Union-Tribune, click here.
Tulare Lake - writer visits the area in San Joaquin Valley where the lake used to exist
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on January 27, 2008 at 2:08 pmFrom the Visalia Times-Delta:
I made a visit to Tulare Lake recently, but I was a hundred years too late. There isn’t much water out there these days, but signs of the historic lake abound if you know where to look. For the uninitiated, this part of California once centered around the largest fresh-water lake in the western United States. Located on the Valley floor between Corcoran and Kettleman City, Tulare Lake had a surface area that exceeded modern Lake Tahoe.
Most of the water in the lake came from the Kings and Kaweah rivers. In wet years, Kern River water also entered the basin from the south.A dense ring of marshland surrounded the lake. In fact, these marshes, which were dominated by a water rush the Spaniards called “tules,” gave the name we still use to this part of California.
“Los Tulares” was the place where the tules grew. The name Tulare Lake resulted from this usage, as did Tulare County. (The lake was within its namesake county until 1893, when Kings County was created out of Tulare County’s westernmost lands.)
What remains of Tulare Lake today? Most years, relatively little of the old lakebed is under water. Almost all the land, in fact, is farmed. The famous J. G. Boswell cotton empire grew from farming the rich soils of the basin.
To read the rest of this article from the Visalia Times-Delta, click here.
Parker Dam turns 70
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on January 7, 2008 at 12:30 pmFrom Lake Havasu’s Today’s News Herald:
More than eighty years ago, a fast-growing Los Angeles looked to the Colorado River to satisfy an almost unquenchable thirst for water. The result was the Parker Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct, a 242-mile manmade river that can carry as much as a billion gallons of water per day to the metropolitan areas of southern California.
It was one of the greatest engineering feats of all time, a fact recognized by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1992, which named the aqueduct one of the seven “wonders” of American engineering.
Almost as an afterthought, the dam gave birth to Lake Havasu, and in turn Lake Havasu City, still growing strong at 56,000 residents and counting. 2008 will see the 70th anniversary of the completion of Parker Dam; the aqueduct was finished three years later, in 1941.
Yet this stunning example of mankind’s ability to bend nature to its will did not come without a price. When Lake Havasu began to form behind the newly completed Parker Dam, it flooded not just barren desert, but forests, grasslands, and the ancestral lands of the Chemehuevi Indians, inhabited for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.
“The dam has done a lot of things�”it brought us tourists and recreation,” said Charles Wood, chairman of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribal Council. “But there’s still this underlying sense of displacement. Our home is out there in the middle of that lake.”
To read the rest of this story from Today’s News-Herald, click here.
Picture of Parker Dam by flickr photographer One Million. Click on the picture to see an enlarged view and to visit the flickr website, where you can see other great pictures from flickr photographers.
California’s early water plan - just 13 pages! plus land-use and GIS data for the Delta
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 28, 2007 at 10:03 pmTake a trip through early California history and check out this old water plan posted on the Department of Water Resources website. It’s just thirteen short pages - and the first five are practically a biography of the author. This brief plan was written in 1919 - which was prior to the Central Valley Project (& of course, the State Water Project). The Owens Valley aqueduct had already been completed, and the Hetch-Hetchy project was under construction.
Colonel Robert Bradford Marshall, the author of the plan, envisions irrigating 12 million acres of farmland, saying:
“The people of California, indifferent to the bountiful gifts that Nature has given them, sit idly by waiting for rain, indefinitely postponing irrigation, and allowing every year millions and millions of dollars in water to pour unused into the sea, when there are hungrty thousands in this and other countries pleading for food and when San Francisco and the Bay Cities, the metropolitan districit of California, are begging for water. Is it indifference or unreasonable procrastination that makes the people of California neglect this wealth, or do they not know what they have or how to use it?”
Regarding population expansion - something being actively encouraged at the time, he writes:
“Consider also that our west coast, particularly that of California, needs protection, and that there can be no better propaganda for patriotism than to place owned homes in the hands of present and prospective citizens, for it is well known and recognized the world over that every man will defend to the death his tract of land, his home, his castle. Place 3,000,000 more in happy country homes in the Valley of California, and she will forever defend herself from invasion”.
You can check it out by clicking here.
GIS fans rejoice! Updated land use data and GIS coverage is now available, and just in time for Christmas! Just the thing for the GIS analyst on your list. Check it out by clicking here.
Aquafornia's Information Desk
Aquafornia Photos on Flickr
Upcoming Events
Check out the upcoming events from the Water Education Foundation.
Recent Posts
- C-WIN, CSPA file suit to end wasteful Delta diversions, protect public trust resources
- Angelenos heed water warnings
- Indian tribes awaiting Klamath Dam removal
- Whitaker-Bermite facility: The perchlorate cleanup plan is a reality, says commentary
- Suppliers seek approval for the “Delta Habitat Conservation and Conveyance Program”
- Salmon-tracking network challenges conventional wisdom
- State panel floats ‘litter tax’ to curb debris along coast
- Delta smelt closer to extinction
- Water settlement knots finally untangling
- Normal rainfall predicted for north state this winter
- Should we recycle urine on Earth, too?
- Who will be Delta’s keeper?
- Increasingly scarce water is the new California gold
- Californians need to worry about food security, says commentary
- Court rejects POWER appeal of All-American Canal case
Aquafornia's Mission
Aquafornia's mission is to educate readers about the complex and often controversial issues surrounding water in California.
Aquafornia is affiliated with the Water Education Foundation, an impartial non-profit organization, whose mission is to create a better understanding of water issues and help resolve water resource problems through educational programs.
Find It
Save / E-mail / Share Aquafornia
E-mail Newsletter
To receive email announcements from the Water Education Foundation, sign up here.
News Article Archives
- Agriculture
- Aquafornia Exclusives
- Biofuels
- Bottled water
- Climate change & water supply
- Commentary
- Conservation
- Delta Issues
- Desalination
- Development & Water
- Drinking Water
- Drought Tolerant Landscaping
- Drought, Weather & Snowpack
- Endangered Species & Wildlife
- Environment & Water
- Events
- General Water Issues
- Grandiose water plans
- Great Green Ideas
- Groundwater
- Indian Water Rights
- Infrastructure
- International Water Issues
- Invasive Species
- Levees
- Monterey Agreements
- National water news
- Oceans and Beaches (all)
- Odds and Ends
- Recycled Water
- Regional Water Issues
- All-American Canal
- Antelope Valley
- Bakersfield
- Bay Area
- Coachella Valley
- Colorado River Basin
- Imperial Irrigation District & Imperial Valley
- Lake Tahoe & the Sierra's
- Las Vegas
- Los Angeles River
- Northern California
- Orange County
- Owens Valley & Mono Lake
- Riverside - San Bernardino
- Sacramento
- Salton Sea
- San Diego
- San Joaquin Valley
- Southern California
- Southwest Water Issues
- Westlands Water District
- Stromwater & Urban Runoff
- Uncategorized
- Water & Energy
- Water & Investing
- Water Agency News (all)
- Water Banking
- Water History
- Water Legislation
- Water Quality
- Water Rights
- Water Storage
- Water Supply
- Water Technologies
- Water Transfers
- Weird & Wacky Water News
