St. Francis Dam and the End of Mulholland’s Reign
Thanks to the 1974 fictionalized movie Chinatown, many people know the infamous story of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, built to capture runoff from the Sierra Nevada in the Owens Valley for delivery to Los Angeles. Construction of the aqueduct, started in 1908, compared in complexity to the building of the Panama Canal. It required 3,900 workers at its peak and involved the digging of 164 tunnels. At the time it was the longest aqueduct in the world …