Today, the Central Valley Project is still the most mind-boggling public works project on five continents, and in the 1960s the state built its own project, nearly as large. Together, the California Water Project and the Central Valley Project have captured enough water to supply eight cities the size of New York. But the projects brought into production far more land than they had water to supply, so the growers had to supplement their surface water with tens of thousands of wells. As a result, the groundwater overdraft, instead of being alleviated, has gotten worse.