Water Scarcity In Los Angeles, California

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Pages: 2

Suffering from drought throughout California, conflicts occurred in Los Angeles, California when the resource of water became extremely limited. In 1903, the city of Los Angeles grew incredibly and as a result, it used up all its water supply. The water wars started when Fred Eaton first saw the river of a farm named Owens Valley. At the age of nineteen, Eaton was already the head of the Los Angeles water company and became the mayor of Los Angeles, and with the lack of water, he devised a plan with William Mulholland to divert this waterway to Los Angeles. Eaton started buying water rights and the farmers thought he was simply doing it for an irrigation process. However, by the time his true intentions were exploited through the newspaper, Eaton had already bought most of the Owens River and the people of Los Angeles supported the idea of creating an aqueduct to transfer to water to their city. …show more content…
This supply of water restored the city, but more people immigrated in, causing the need for water to become constant to the point where the lake dried up in the November of 1924. When the people of the Owens Valley were informed that they would be getting no profit of the uses up water from their lake, they began bombing the aqueduct until Mulholland imposed martial law for it to stop. In 1970, another aqueduct was built that absorbed all the groundwater from Owens Valley, causing groundwater to dry and vegetation to die off. Several aqueducts were built one after another, drying up water bodies for the use of California. Even today, supplies of water are continuously needed to satisfy the never ending water crisis of this