On November 5, 1913, William Mulholland stood at the Cascades — the aqueduct’s terminus in the San Fernando Valley — watched the first water pour through, and said five words: “There it is. Take it.” Los Angeles took it. Within a decade, Owens Lake — a 110-square-mile body of water 200 miles north of the city, fed by the same Owens River the aqueduct now diverted — was dry. By 1926, the lake was an alkali flat. By the 1990s, the dry lakebed had become the single largest source of particulate dust pollution in the United States — carcinogenic PM10 particles, 100 times above federal air safety standards, blowing into the lungs of Owens Valley residents who had watched their water, their agriculture, and their lake disappear through a pipe to Los Angeles. As of 2026, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has spent $2.5 billion on dust mitigation alone — shallow flooding, managed vegetation, gravel cover, and drip irrigation across 48.6 square miles of lakebed, an area roughly the size of San Francisco — using 60,000 acre-feet of water per year for the dust program, enough to supply 240,000 households. The water used to suppress the dust from the lake that was drained to supply Los Angeles is now itself a significant drain on the water supply. The aqueduct solved a water crisis. The solution created an air quality crisis. The air quality fix created a water crisis. The loop is still open.
The scheme
In 1900, Los Angeles had a population of approximately 200,000 and a water supply that came from the Los Angeles River, a few wells, and local springs. The city was growing faster than its water. Fred Eaton — former mayor, engineer, visionary grifter depending on your source — identified the Owens River, 233 miles north in the Eastern Sierra, as the solution. Eaton traveled to the Owens Valley posing as a rancher, buying land and water rights from local farmers who did not know they were selling to Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times ran a propaganda campaign warning of imminent drought to build public support for a $23 million bond to fund construction. Mulholland — a self-taught engineer who had worked his way from ditch digger to superintendent of the city’s water system — designed and supervised the aqueduct: 233 miles of canals, tunnels, and steel siphons, entirely gravity-fed, dropping from 4,000 feet in the Owens Valley to 1,000 feet in the San Fernando Valley without a single pump. The project was compared to the Panama Canal. It was completed in five years.
The covert land acquisition — agents posing as ranchers, secret negotiations, a cooperative press — follows the same pattern the course has documented in intelligence operations and institutional power projection: the acquisition of strategic assets through deception, using front operations that obscure the buyer’s identity and intent. Eaton was, functionally, an intelligence operative running a land-acquisition campaign under cover, backed by a sympathetic press and a municipal government that treated the water rights of a rural community as a resource to be captured. The Paiute people — the Nüümü, whose irrigation channels had spread water through the valley for centuries — were not consulted. Their water rights were not purchased because their water rights were not recognized.
The water wars
By the 1920s, the aqueduct had drained the Owens River so completely that local agriculture collapsed. Ranchers and farmers who had sold water rights watched their remaining wells drop. Springs dried up. The rabbits the Paiute hunted vanished. In 1924, Owens Valley residents seized the aqueduct and dynamited it — 17 separate bombings across several years, a guerrilla campaign against the infrastructure that was killing their valley. Los Angeles sent armed guards. The bombings continued. The city eventually bought out most of the remaining landowners, acquiring nearly all private land in Inyo County — which LADWP still owns and leases back to local residents in 2026, a landlord-tenant relationship between a municipal utility and a rural community that has lasted a century.
In 1928, the St. Francis Dam — built by Mulholland in San Francisquito Canyon after his falling-out with Eaton over the Long Valley reservoir price — catastrophically failed, sending a 100-foot wall of water down the canyon and killing at least 431 people. The disaster ended Mulholland’s career. It did not end the aqueduct. A second aqueduct was built in 1970, doubling the system’s capacity and pumping groundwater from beneath the valley — dropping water tables by as much as 75 feet in some areas. In 1941, the system was extended north to Mono Lake, diverting tributaries that fed a saline lake critical to migratory bird populations. By the 1990s, Mono Lake had dropped 45 feet. A court order in 1994 restricted LADWP’s Mono Lake diversions — the result of a campaign led by university students who discovered the ecological damage and organized one of the most successful environmental lawsuits in California history.
The dust bill
Owens Lake’s dry lakebed — exposed alkali sediment, fine-grained, salt-crusted, and highly susceptible to wind erosion — generated an estimated 62,377 tons of PM10 dust per year by 2000. The Iran qanats that sustained civilizations for 3,000 years were self-regulating — they could not extract more than the aquifer replenished. The LA Aqueduct had no such regulation. It diverted the entire flow of the Owens River — an average of 260 million gallons per day — for 73 years before any water was restored. The Mexico City Gran Canal failed because the city sank below its own drainage system. The LA Aqueduct succeeded at its stated purpose — delivering water — and failed at everything the stated purpose didn’t account for: the lake, the air, the valley, the people.
LADWP’s dust mitigation program, mandated by the EPA in 1998, has now cost $2.5 billion. The 48.6 square miles of controlled lakebed require 60,000 acre-feet of water per year — water that travels through the same aqueduct that drained the lake, diverted back to the lakebed to suppress the dust the draining caused, at a cost that is passed to LADWP ratepayers. Every drop used for dust control is a drop replaced by higher-priced imported water from the Colorado River and the State Water Project. The supply chain economics that make critical mineral extraction profitable only until the environmental remediation costs arrive apply to water infrastructure with the same brutal logic: the extraction was cheap, the remediation is not, and the bill arrives decades after the profit has been spent.
The 2025 fires
In January 2025, the Palisades fire destroyed over 5,000 structures in one of Los Angeles’ wealthiest neighborhoods. In the aftermath, investigators discovered that the Santa Ynez Reservoir — a 117-million-gallon facility near the fire zone — had been offline and empty during the fire. LADWP is now facing mass tort litigation from over 3,300 victims, with lawsuits alleging that the utility neglected maintenance protocols and subsequently altered policy documents and computer logs to conceal a four-hour delay in cutting power during the fire. The same utility that drained the Owens Valley, killed the lake, and spent $2.5 billion on dust remediation is now defending itself against accusations of infrastructure negligence in one of the deadliest urban fires in California history. The military infrastructure designed for maximum readiness and the autonomous systems built for continuous monitoring exist in a world where failure is unacceptable. LADWP exists in a world where failure is litigation — and the litigation is measured in billions.
Why it’s in the course
The Los Angeles Aqueduct is infrastructure that built a metropolis by draining an ecosystem — 233 miles of gravity-fed pipe that turned a city of 200,000 into a city of 4 million, killed a lake, poisoned the air, displaced an indigenous population, inspired a guerrilla bombing campaign, killed 431 people when the supplementary dam collapsed, drained a second lake until a court ordered it to stop, spent $2.5 billion remediating the dust from the first lake, and is now being sued for the fire that burned the neighborhoods the water was supposed to protect. The Chicago River Reversal connected two ecosystems and created a 126-year invasive species crisis. The Mexico City Gran Canal was designed to drain by gravity and sank below its own outlet. The LA Aqueduct was designed to deliver water and destroyed the source it was delivering from — and the city that took the water is now spending $2.5 billion to put some of it back, not for the valley’s benefit but to keep the dust from the dead lake out of the valley’s lungs.
“There it is. Take it.” Mulholland said it in 1913. LADWP is still taking it. The dabbawalas built infrastructure through trust. The Schwebebahn built infrastructure through precision. The Falkirk Wheel built infrastructure through ambition. The LA Aqueduct built infrastructure through deception — land agents posing as ranchers, a compliant press, a bond campaign built on manufactured urgency — and the city it built is the city that exists today, drinking water from a valley it emptied, breathing air it poisoned, putting water back on a lakebed it drained, and defending itself in court for an empty reservoir during a fire that burned the neighborhoods the aqueduct was built to sustain. The bill for “Take it” is $2.5 billion and counting — and that’s just the dust.