Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water

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Okay, so all of that said, let's get on to the episode. I am here with the fabulous ThruLine producer Anya Steinberg.
Hi, Anya. Hi, Julie.
How's it going? It's going good. I'm here in rainy Seattle talking to you.
Oh, nice. Well, you know, we're doing this kind of behind the scenes conversation, which I love to do because so much goes into all of our episodes.
And let's talk about this episode that you pitched, reported called Water in the West.

Yes. What was that? Tell me a little bit about what that is.
Yeah. Yeah.
This is perfect, actually, because, I mean, I mentioned it's rainy. We're going to be going back in my mind to sunny, beautiful California, which is where this story takes place.
And basically, this story that I pitched is the story of what happened when Los Angeles decided to build an aqueduct from this place called the Owens Valley all the way to LA. The LA aqueduct is made up of like some open channels lined with concrete.
There's some large pipes as a part of it. It looks different in different places, but the whole goal is to move water from a place that has it to a place that doesn't.
And they did that because they needed water to make the city into the metropolis it is today. Are you going to leave this water here for 5,000 people in this, you know, isolated mountain valley? Or are you going to let it go to Los Angeles where 100 or 200,000 people are going to make use of it, and we're going to have a metropolis? Which would you choose? If your principle is utilitarianism, using a resource for the most people for the most good, then it's an easy call to say, Los Angeles, you're going to get the water.
And so the Owens Valley, we're told, sorry, folks, more people down there. They have the money.
They own the water already. We are going to permit L.A.
to do this. And so that's what happened.
But when they did that, it had unintended consequences on like a variety of levels. You know, it made people in the valley mad.
It affected the environment. There's all this kind of drama that plays out after the aqueduct opens.
So that's what this episode is about. And, you know, when you first started talking to me about this, what I realized is my knowledge of the L.A.
aqueduct kind of comes from this 1974 Roman Polanski movie called Chinatown. Yes, a classic.
It really is. But you know, that's fictionalized, but it's fictionalized around a lot of the story of LA kind of moving from a dusty small town to becoming this like paradise.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think you can't like understate how much the aqueduct changed LA. Like you said, it basically went from like this dusty frontier town with a couple thousand people living there to this enormous city, the basis of Hollywood, kind of the epitome of the American dream.
And that is all because of the water that the aqueduct brought. Got it.
And so usually the story, as far as like what I would say common knowledge might be around it, is usually told from the perspective of Los Angeles. So like the movie Chinatown, like a lot of other things, Cadillac Desert, other kind of reporting around this.
But you wanted to tell this story from a different perspective. So could you just talk to me a little bit about how you decided

to do that and the trip that it ended up taking you on? Yeah. Well, like you said, this is not a new story.
There's already been a lot done about it. There's been fictional and non-fictional like documentaries made about this.
So when I was thinking about how this episode was going to work and how to through-line-ify this story.

Through-line-ify.

I love that.

Through-line-ify. So when I was thinking about how this episode was going to work and how to through lineify this story, I really wanted to go somewhere new and I wanted to meet new kinds of people.
And I think the story a lot of times is told from LA's point of view. And it's also told from Los Angeles.
Like, what did the aqueduct bring to Los Angeles? What did the people in Los Angeles think of it? Who were the people in Los Angeles that made it happen? And I wanted to refocus that onto, like, what did this take away from the place where the water came from? And what happened there? How did people react? And how were their lives changed by this event? And so, luckily, I got the chance to go there, which I think was really, really important too. I've done a couple of reporting trips for the show.
It's always nice when you have these place-based stories to be able to feel the place that you're going to be storytelling about, be able to like breathe the air, hear the sounds, like meet the people who live there and just get a sense of like the culture the vibes what's happening and i think for this story like you know the history is so lived in the present in the owens valley like you can really see the effects of the history that this episode is about and you can also like feel it when you talk to people who live you know, like a huge consequence of this aqueduct building is that the LA department of water and power owns a lot of the land in the Valley. And like there's signs everywhere that say, you know, no trespassing.
This is LADWP property. There's LADWP trucks everywhere.
A lot of the people in the Valley work for LADWP and a lot of people in the Valley, like I mentioned, have opinions about the aqueduct in the present day. They have feelings about it.
There's a lot of emotion. Like, I think I was surprised by how many people there were brought to tears when they were talking to me about this story and like what it meant to them.
And, you know, the aqu opened in 1913 is that right and here we are in 2024 and it's still operational this is still where la gets a lot of its water from it's this is about like 250 miles from la right 233 precise. By aqueduct.
That's how long the aqueduct is. Yeah.
And so, I mean, it's really interesting to think about like, this is still there, first of all, and that this is still a living story. Not all histories, not everything we tell is contemporary and still happening, but this one really is.
So that's really, really interesting. So, okay.
So you drove, where did you go to, to, to tell the story? Well, I, I started in the Bay area in Oakland and I drove the seven hours on paper to the Owens Valley. And I say on paper because I'm a really slow driver.
So it actually took me like 10. That's embarrassing to admit, but everyone who knows me knows that I'm a grandma behind the wheel.
So I took my time and it's one of the most beautiful drives I've ever done in my life. The Owens Valley is, it's in Eastern California.
It's bordered by the Sierra Nevada mountains. It's very close to Yosemite.
It's just gorgeous. And you basically drive through Yosemite to get there.
So the roads are extremely hilly, very twisty, very turny. There were a lot of points that I had to pull over and just breathe for a second.
So it's a bit precarious, but it was also gorgeous. And you pass through just a lot of classic California forests, cool mountain air, beautiful streams.
And so all that water is snowmelt basically from the mountains, right? From the Sierra Mountains. Yes.
And I was there in in the late spring so i feel like it was a time when the snow melt was just starting to melt interesting i didn't think about that yeah so you can kind of get a sense probably from your drive just like what kind of rugged terrain you know they were looking at in 19 right and i'm driving a car on roads and they were building the aqueduct using mule powered machinery so it is crazy to think of this message comes from tourism australia there's something for everyone in australia all year round hiking mossman Gorge in the Daintree Rainforest is the

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Visit ucsd.edu slash research. So, okay, so let's look at some of the people that you met, especially in the Owens Valley.
So one of the people I think you met is a man named Noah Williams. So can you just talk to me a little bit about how you connected with him in the first place, what it was like to hang out with him, and what were your impressions of the landscape walking around with him? So I met Noah at an event that I went to in the valley.
This was my first day there. And it was an event being hosted by something called the Owens Valley Indian Water Commission.
And a big piece of the contemporary story of the valley is that, you know, indigenous people have lived in the valley for thousands of years. And when the aqueduct was built, it was at this very complicated time in American history for Native people.
And without going into all of the details, of which there are many, and you can listen to the episode to find out, the aqueduct was a raw deal for a lot of the valley's indigenous people, the Paiute people, the Shoshone people. And they still live there today.
There are several reservations in the Valley and they still have a lot of negotiating that they want to do with LADWP. They believe that their water rights are not being respected in the modern day.
They believe they are owed more from LADWP and they believe LADWP is doing environmental harm to the valley through the operation of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. So I was at an event hosted by this commission to basically raise awareness for residents of LA about the LA Aqueduct and the history.
So they invite like groups of people from Los Angeles to come on like a weekend long retreat and they walk around, they have presentations, they let people experience the valley and where their water comes from in this way that they have never experienced before. So it was a really cool event.
And that's where I met Noah because he was there giving some talks because he's the water program coordinator for the Big Pine Paiute tribe. So.
And what was it like for you to sort of be there after you'd been researching and reading and watching documentaries, et cetera, et cetera. And then you're actually in the place.
Yeah. Because I had arrived in the dark after my 10 hour drive, driving to this event in the morning was kind of my first glimpse of the valley in its totality.
and it was just breathtaking. I mean, there's like one major highway

that runs through the whole thing. And then all around you is just this vast expanse of like beauty.
I don't know how else to put it, but there's mountains on all sides with these huge jagged snow covered peaks. There's like desert scrub scrub vegetation which there's not a lot of buildings because los angeles department of water and power like i said owns a lot of the land and they keep it undeveloped because they're not really interested in the land they're more interested in the water rights associated with the land so it's essentially just like mostly empty of.
So you can see all around you. And when I got to this event and I met Noah off the bat, he was just very, very intently focused on like telling me his story and the story of the valley and the story of his people.
And so I, I mean, I spent like an hour with him that day, just grilling him on this hike that we went on, uh, which kudos to him because hiking and talking is a whole other can of worms. And he was a very good sport about that.
So I met, I met him on this hike and then we arranged to meet up later that week so that he could show me some traces of, ancestors, these ancient irrigation ditches that exist all over the valley that Paiute and Shoshone people used to irrigate the valley before the Los Angeles aqueduct existed. It's really interesting to me to think about, like, that water, that resource has been manipulated by human beings for a long time.
So to see like, how was it used by Native people? And how is it being used now by the city of Los Angeles is really interesting to sort of like, compare and just see like, what's some of the technology that it and how what is it that you see in the landscape once you know what you're looking for and that was exactly my experience I went on this hike with him and I was being skeptical about what I would see and at first on the hike I I honestly didn't get it he kept pointing out these things and he was like this is a ditch ditch. And I was like, what are we looking at? Like, I don't really, I kept having to have him like describe or like literally go stand where he was talking about, like, this is the middle of the ditch.
And I was like, okay, I think I see it. But as we kept going on this walk, like it started to click into place for me.
And I could see like these ditches are sometimes very deep and well preserved. And sometimes they're just like this faint whisper on the land almost, which is almost cooler to me that he can pick this out and that this has been mapped out by him and others from the tribe.
But it was just crazy to see like once the ditch starts to like pop out of the landscape at you, how they like turn and swoop the kind of the engineering that was created to move the water without any sort of like pumping power machinery. It's very, it is in a way reminiscent of the LA Aqueduct itself because the LA Aqueduct is runs gravity.
There's no pumps. So I feel like similar ideas were going on when the Paiute and Shoshone people designed their irrigation ditches.
As a former environmental science major in college, I was really nerding out about how they manipulated and used this water in a way that changed the landscape to their betterment and also like fed into the natural water cycle of the valley you know the water the snow would melt off the mountains and run through these ditches across the valley and all the while they're irrigating the land so there's it's it's not like irrigation like we grow corn in these massive rows it was more just like soaking water into various parts of the land so that flora and fauna would grow, trees, grasses, and animals would come. Animals that you could eat, like plants that you could eat would grow.
And then, you know, the water soaks through the ground and recharges the water table. And so that is like how the water cycle works.
It cycles through the landscape. So

it was very, very cool to see that in action. And then to also see in the modern day and in the absence of that system and in the presence of a system where the LA Aqueduct is taking water out of the valley never to return, like how that has changed what the landscape looks like.
You know, it's dry, it's dusty, it's deserty.

It was hard to imagine what Noah was talking about when he was describing what it would have looked like in the past. And so there's another person there that you hung out with.
Tell me a little bit about Richard Petashian. Richard, he was one of my favorite people that I met.
He's just so kooky, so himself.

Very, like, California hippie character. When I met him, he rolled up in this big red pickup truck with all these bumper stickers on the back.
Like one of them I remember seeing was LA sucks the Owens Valley dry, like, which, um, I thought was funny. and he was wearing this like long sleeve tie-dye shirt that said furry hippie on it he has like kind of shoulder length white hair that's a little bit all over the place and the kind of person that he is is just the kind of person that's very chatty can talk your ear off and actually when we were like in the parking lot getting ready leave, he like struck up this conversation with these other people in the parking lot.
And we just stood there for 10 minutes. I was checking my watch, like, are we going to get out on the road? And he's talking their ear off about Owens Valley, this Owens Valley, that you should go here.
It was just a cute experience. And what does he do? Why were you talking to him? He's a longtime resident of the Valley.
And this history of the aqueduct is like a little bit of a passion project of his. Like he showed up with a stack of books and they had all of these sticky notes sticking out of them.
And they were just books about the Valley's history and about the aqueduct's history. And he was like using them to reference pictures and notes and things while we were talking.
So this is definitely something he cares about. And he has researched for a long time, which is why I wanted to talk to him.
So with both Noah and Richard, you were out in the field in their, you know, in their valley. And, you know, you went on sort of, I don't know if I would call them adventures, but you yes I mean maybe you went on they were they were adventures yeah especially with Richard yeah tell me about that yeah we a little bit of this is in the episode but he we had this grand plan to go see like the main sites of the aqueduct the place where it begins and a couple of historical sites along the way and a lot of these sites are located down these service roads because obviously the aqueduct is still in operation.
So LADWP uses these service roads. And we turn onto them.
It's a very bumpy, dirt, gravel road. And we very quickly come up against this fence that is seemingly locked.
And an outtake from the episode is just the expletives that Richard let out when he thought that our whole day might be foiled by this padlocked fence. But it turns out there was no lock on it.
It was just a chain wrapped around the fence. So we just unwrapped the chain and shrugged our shoulders and drove through.
And that was how we ended up at the place where the Los Angeles Aqueduct begins, also known as the Aqueduct Intake. I mean, this is something you and I talked about a lot as we were working on this and conceptualizing it.
Like, what is this about? What is it really about? And what is it really, really about? Really, really, really about. And I know one of the things that we talked about is this idea of that Roosevelt sort of, you know, we have to make decisions based on the greatest good for the greatest number.
How do you think about the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number? I think it's an extremely complex moral question. I think you and I came into this episode kind of from different viewpoints.
You know, I actually appreciated that because I think that tension like helped shape the episode where we were both trying to talk to each other about this and talk through what we thought of this like moral question. And that kind of push and pull is really at the heart of the episode.
But I think the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number is a question that no matter where we live in the US, you're going to have to face at some point in the future. I mean, not to be a merchant of doom and gloom, but climate change exists.
And as these effects worsen or intensify, I think people will be asking a lot of questions about like, how do we allocate the limited resources we have to do good? And is it right to be able to take from one place to give to another? I think a lot of people in the Owens Valley expressed to me that they felt like a water colony, you know, a colony of Los Angeles, like something that only existed to be extracted from. And I think that that is the flip side of the greatest good for the greatest number.
Because on one hand, when you have need and you want to address that need, I think there's very real humanitarian reasons why we should help people. And sometimes taking resources from one place to the other is the way to do that but that always has an effect downstream right pardon my pun but yeah so if anything working on this episode made me more confused about what I think of that sentiment but it is a really interesting way to engage with this moral question that we're all going to be grappling with.
And a lot of places outside of California already do in different ways. Yeah.
I love when our episodes get into a kind of philosophical place, which a lot of the times that's what's happening behind the scenes, dear listeners, is we're like, okay, we're going to tell this story about the LA Aqueduct. Why are we doing it? Why now? What's different about the way we're going to tell this story? Is there anything that really stood out an aha moment you had while you were reporting? or well to go back to Richard I was very tired at this point I had met with other people before Richard.
I'd been working for 10 hours at that point, just talking. So I was kind of like tapped out, ready to go back to the car.
And Richard stopped me. We were at this site called the Alabama Gates, where in the 1920s, the residents of the valley occupied the gates for four days and shut off the water supply to the LA aqueduct or diverted the LA aqueduct to run into the valley.
So we were at the Alabama gates and he was like, can you turn on your tape recorder again? I have something else to say. And then he just delivered this very beautiful soliloquy to me of like kind of these very emotional reflections that I feel like, you know, he spent decades thinking about this issue and living here.

And a lot of it I don't think made it into the episode, which is why it's the perfect thing to talk about now.

But he was talking a lot about the humanity of everybody involved, the decisions that people were making,

the secret fears and hopes that they were driven by, and how that all gets entangled together to create

history. Does it ever make you emotional to like stand at these sites and just think? Oh yeah, terribly so, yeah.
But yeah, it's really emotional because once you've invested a great deal of your time and effort in researching, you know, a story like this and shared it with the public. Yeah, I feel I get really emotional.
I think about not just the men and the women who were here at the gates, but I think about everybody. It gets me really emotional to think about Eaton and Mulholland, President Roosevelt, J.D.
Lippincott, you know, all the key figures. I feel, I always get emotional when I talk about the Wattersons too.
And again, talk about self-interest and greed and tremendous violations of trust, all based on self-interest and greed.

And, you know, the interest of Los Angeles, a growing city.

And not being able to really feel the heart and soul of what was happening here.

It's just, what, what a story. I just thought that was beautiful.
It almost brought me to tears and he was, he was getting very emotional about it too, um, in the moment. So I think about that a lot.
And I think that's something that we try and tease out in every episode that we make, whether it's about, you know, the LA Aqueduct or the history of smell or whatever. It's just the humanity at the center of history.

Because at the end of the day, it's people facing decisions in the past that we may have to make again in the future or decisions we may have never fathomed of making and it's at the core of every history that is i love hearing that anya i think that's a just a perfect place to to end our conversation and it was it's really was really great working on this episode with you as it is working on many things with you day Ditto. It is working on many things with you.
Day in and day out. Okay, well, everybody really thanks a lot for listening to this with us.
And if you want to hear more of these really cool bonus episodes behind the scenes, how did we make this? What's some tape we didn't play for you kind of episodes sponsor free meaning no ads and you want to just support more work like this please consider signing up for throughline plus you can find out more at plus.npr.org and we'll be back with another bonus episodes just for Threline Plus supporters next month. Until then, thanks a lot and have a good one.
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