The System
Even before Aitken was resolved, the city's Mono Basin waterworks were under construction. They consisted of:
A diversion dam on Lee Vining Creek, four miles up from the lakeshore and 338 miles from Los Angeles. This is the northernmost point on the Los Angeles aqueduct system; a further reach to Mill Creek, six miles farther north, had been rejected because of cost.
A buried pipeline curving along the Sierra slope, scooping up Rush Creek tributary creeks Parker and Walker along the way and continuing south to the Grant Lake reservoir.
Grant Lake reservoir on Rush Creek, eight stream miles above the lake. This impoundment would store the waters brought in from the northern creeks, as well as the flows of Rush Creek itself.
Another stretch of buried pipeline running from Grant Lake to the base of the Mono Craters, at a spot called West Portal, where the major tunneling began.
The Mono Craters Tunnel, leading at a constant descending angle 11.5 miles under the craters and the wooded heights beyond and down to East Portal, the discharge point on the upper Owens River.
Once through the mountain, the export water would flow down the upper Owens into Long Valley reservoir at the head of the Owens Gorge. Instead of running down the gorge, it would be sent on a parallel course through penstocks and power plants. (This gorge bypass was not completed until 1953.) Rejoining the Owens bed at the bottom of the defile, the flow would pass on down the river 50 miles to the aqueduct takeout point near Lone Pine.
One more element essential to the plan was not formally included in it: a second,
Image not available.
Inspecting the Mono Craters Tunnel. H. A.
Van Norman (left) succeeded Mulholland
as Water and Power general manager and
chief engineer.
(Photo courtesy Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power)
parallel Los Angeles aqueduct from the Owens River south. Without this "second barrel," the city could take only part of the Mono water to which it was entitled. Construction, however, would be delayed for decades.
Of all the engineering achievements that make up the Los Angeles aqueduct system, the Mono Craters Tunnel may be the most remarkable. Burrowing from both portals and from two vertical access shafts, the crews encountered long sections of rotten rock that had to be supported with steel casings. Groundwater poured into the bore, and so did suffocating carbon dioxide; an additional vertical shaft had to be drilled to vent it. When the tunnel passed through the warm core of these volcanic domes, it collapsed; a mess of water and shattered rock backed up for nearly two miles, killing two men. The job took almost four years in all, and half a dozen lives.
For Lee Vining, the immediate effect of the project was to lift the community out of the Depression several years before World War II ended the slump for the rest of the country. Both East Portal and West Portal had encampments that were really towns, with schools, churches, bars, outlying brothels, and baseball teams playing in a local league. Among the buildings erected in Lee Vining then was a sort of Quonset hut that served as a dance hall for construction men; in a rather nice twist, it would wind up forty years later as the headquarters of the Mono Lake Committee.
Another twist was in the making. During this same period, hundreds of miles away, work was proceeding on the city's second and much larger new aqueduct, the one to the Colorado. The Mono Extension had been sold to the voters as an interim source, a
Image not available.
Wallis McPherson lived most of
his life in the Mono Basin—until
distress at the condition of the
lake drove him north over the
hills to Bridgeport.
(Photo by Gerda S. Mathan)
stopgap pending the tapping of the great southwestern river. But it was the Colorado project that moved faster. The two new supplies would arrive at almost the same moment. The Colorado River, not the eastern Sierra, would serve Los Angeles as secondary source—an insurance policy, expensive but in the long run worth the price.