Deja Vu All Over Again

Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta

In the 1974 movie Chinatown, an aggrieved wife hires private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) to get the goods on her adulterous husband. Jake finds himself caught up in murder, incest and a scheme by corrupt Los Angeles officials to steal water for their municipal supply. (Jake also gets to partake in some adultery himself, with Faye Dunaway. But that’s getting off-topic.)

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California last week purchased four islands and part of a fifth – 20,369 acres – in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The giant district represents more than two-dozen cities and water agencies in the Los Angeles area. Why, you ask, did this agency pay $175 million to a subsidiary of Zurich Insurance (also owner of Farmers Insurance and dozens of others) to purchase these islands located 370 miles north of L.A.? Simple, they want the water.

This may have sneaked up on Delta citizens while they were looking the other way. They have noisily opposed Governor Jerry Brown’s proposal to spend $15 billion building tunnels for the purpose of sending Sacramento River water south to slake the thirst of corporate farms in the Central Valley.

The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is over 700 square miles of waterways and wetlands and farmland, dotted with nearly sixty islands and tracts of land. It is a destination for boating and fishing. Two-thirds of it is below sea level and protected by a thousand miles of aging and decrepit levees.

The Chinatown plot is loosely based on the surreptitious seizure of water from the Owens River– a mere 200 miles away – early in the twentieth century. William Mulholland, on behalf of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had quietly bought land in the Owens Valley on the east side of the Sierra Mountains. By the time people realized what was happening, Mulholland’s agency was

Owens Lake
Owens Lake

building an aqueduct to the river. The gates opened in 1913, diverting the water that had irrigated the high-desert basin. By 1924, Owens Lake was dry. A second aqueduct opened in 1970 to pump out the groundwater. The pristine Crystal Geyser “Alpine Spring Water” in the plastic bottle also comes from the rapidly declining subterranean aquifer.

Mulholland Drive is a scenic twenty-one-mile road through the Hollywood Hills and the Santa Monica Mountains. People in the Owens Valley breathe air filled with dust from the dried-up lake at one hundred times the rate deemed safe for particulate matter. The Delta hopes to do better than Jake Gittes.

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