Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Edmonston’s scheme was mesmerizing. The largest water project ever built by a state or local government was New York City’s Delaware water system, completed during World War II. The Delaware Aqueduct was eighty-five miles long and entirely underground—by far the longest hard-rock tunnel in the world. But the California Water Plan, in its first phase alone, contemplated the movement of four times more water over a distance six times as long. What was even more startling was that most of the water would go to irrigation. The Delaware Aqueduct had left New York, a Babylon of wealth, up to its ears in debt. But since each average household paid around a hundred dollars an acre-foot for water, and because the city had a huge commercial and industrial sector sharing the cost, the bonds would be paid off unless the city, for some reason, saw its growth curve go drastically into reverse. In the mid-1950s, the most that irrigation farmers could pay for water was, by a generous average, about $15 an acre-foot—less than a fifth as much as New Yorkers paid. And New York City’s water arrived by gravity; California’s farmers would have to pay for several hundred vertical feet of pumping, and Los Angeles would have to buy water pumped more than three thousand feet if the aqueduct went over instead of through the Tehachapi Mountains. (The United Western Investigation had already concluded that tunneling was too risky because of earthquake hazards.) How could anyone afford it?