Samuel T. Clover’s Daily News, the only paper on record opposing the aqueduct, lobbed a potential bombshell when it reported that the city’s workers, under cover of darkness, were dumping water out of the reservoirs into the Pacific to make them go dry, thus assuring a “yes” vote. But Mulholland’s lame explanation that they had merely been “flushing the system” was widely believed. On September 7, 1905, the bond issue passed, fourteen to one.
