The Los Angeles Aqueduct Cascades, Where LA’s Water Comes Tumbling In
Off Interstate 5 in Sylmar, water from the Eastern Sierra tumbles down the Los Angeles Aqueduct Cascades. The story of the 233-mile aqueduct, Mulholland’s “There it is. Take it.” and the cost to the Owens Valley.
Updated
If you drive Interstate 5 through Sylmar, at the north end of the San Fernando Valley, look up at the hillside to the east. You’ll see water tumbling down a long staircase of concrete steps. That’s the Los Angeles Aqueduct Cascades, where water from the Eastern Sierra, more than 200 miles away, finally arrives in Los Angeles. Without it, LA, now a city of nearly 4 million people, would never have grown past the limits of its small river.
William Mulholland and Fred Eaton scout the Owens River as a potential source of water for Los Angeles
In the early 1900s, Los Angeles was booming, and city leaders could see that the Los Angeles River wouldn’t be enough for much longer.
The answer came from Fred Eaton, a former mayor, who had his eye on the Owens River, fed by Sierra snowmelt more than 200 miles to the north. He brought in William Mulholland, the head of the city’s water system, and the two scouted it together. Eaton quietly bought up land and water rights in the Owens Valley, and Los Angeles voters approved bonds in 1905 to buy the water and in 1907 to build an aqueduct.
Construction started in 1908 and finished in 1913. The aqueduct runs 233 miles, through 142 tunnels, and it was one of the biggest engineering projects in the country. Amazingly, it runs entirely on gravity, with no pumps, because the Owens Valley sits higher than Los Angeles.
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The Cascades are where it all comes out. After rushing through pipes and tunnels, the water spills down the steps, which slow it down and stir air into it before it continues on.
From there, it flows into reservoirs and pipelines and, eventually, out of the taps of millions of Angelenos.
William Mulholland opens the Cascades on November 5, 1913.
Mulholland, an Irish immigrant and self-taught engineer, ran the project as chief engineer of the city’s Bureau of Water Works and Supply, the forerunner of today’s Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It finished on time and under budget. On November 5, 1913, as the first water came down the Cascades in front of a huge crowd, Mulholland gave one of the shortest speeches in California history: “There it is. Take it.”
Fred Eaton was an LA native, the city’s first homegrown engineer and a former mayor, and without him, there would have been no water rights to build on.
Thousands of workers built it, digging tunnels and laying pipe across the Mojave in brutal heat and cold.
The water came at a cost. Los Angeles took so much of the Owens River that farms in the Owens Valley dried up and Owens Lake turned into a dusty flat. Valley residents fought back, at one point dynamiting the aqueduct, and the bitterness still hasn’t fully faded. It’s the story at the heart of Chinatown and of Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert.
Wide shot of the Cascades from Interstate 5 in Southern California
Still, the Cascades are a remarkable sight, and an important one. More than a century later, they’re still delivering water from the Sierra to Los Angeles, entirely by gravity. Next time you’re stuck in traffic on the 5 in Sylmar, look up the hill. That’s where modern Los Angeles really began.
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