1911
"The Owens River created Los Angeles, letting a great city grow where common sense dictated that one should never be but one could just as well say that it ruined Los Angeles too. The annexation of the San Fernando Valley, a direct result of the aqueduct, instantly made it the largest city in the world in geographic size. From that moment, it was doomed to become a huge sprawling, one-story conurbation, hopelessly dependant on the automobile. The Owens River made Los Angeles large enough and wealthy enought to go out and capture any river within six hundred miles, and that made it larger, wealthier, and a good deal more awful. It is the only megalopolis in North America which is mentioned in the same breath as Mexico City of Djakarta-- a place whose insoluble excesses raise the specter of some majestic, stately kind of collapse."
and the people of the Owens Valley were pissed
"For Los Angeles to take their water to fill their washtubs and water glasses was one thing. For it to turn their valley back to desert so that another desert valley, owned by rich monopolists, could bloom in its place was quite another"
and that is how the story goes time and again with the big city prevailing over the small town.
and now, Los Angeles is the second most populous desert city on Earth, right after Cairo.
the dry bed's dust = 800,000 years of salt deposits, with arsenic, cadmium, nickel, and chromium. making Inyo County a pretty unhealthy place to be.
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