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print this page100 Years Of Dust: Owens Lake and the Los Angeles Aqueduct
Jennifer Little
Saturday, November 15 - 2:00PM to 3:00PM
NYFA: 3300 Riverside Drive, Burbank, CA, 91505
This project documents the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's (LADWP) legally mandated dust mitigation program at Owens Dry Lake in Southern California. It is the latest chapter in a century of legal battles over water rights and air quality in Owens Valley.
Owens Lake lies in California's Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains, about 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles. This 110-square-mile lake began to dry up in 1913 when the City of Los Angeles diverted the Owens River into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The new water supply allowed Los Angeles to continue its growth and turned the arid San Fernando Valley into an agricultural oasis, but at a tremendous environmental cost. By 1926, Owens Lake was a dry alkali flat, and its dust became the largest source of carcinogenic particulate air pollution in North America.
In 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency mandated that LADWP take steps to minimize this dust pollution, which was 100 times greater than federal air safety standards. LADWP began construction on the Owens Lake Dust Mitigation Project in the year 2000. They have installed 42 square miles of dust mitigation zones, including gravel cover, managed vegetation, 34 water pump stations, buried drip tubing, and irrigation bubblers to shallow flood the dry lakebed. This dust mitigation program has cost more than $1.2 billion to date and requires so much water that it may not be sustainable as climate change results in a drier climate for California, which is currently experiencing the worst drought in recorded history.
speaker
Jennifer Little
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