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Soledad Canyon the line enters another tunnel piercing the San Gabriel fault, before turning south-
east, utilizing sag pipe crossings of Quigly and Placarita Canyons. The last tunnel was between
Placarita Canyon and south front of the western San Gabriel Range, just east of [San]
Fernando/Fremont Pass. Here the mountains were lifted abruptly along the Santa Susana thrust. San
Fernando Reservoir was constructed between 1911-1917, about a mile south of the Cascades, the
aqueduct’s southern portal. Construction began in October 1907 and was essentially completed in
May 1913, at cost of $24.6 million.

Completion. Approximately 30,000 people had gathered to watch the first Owens water flow down
the open channel aeration cascade at the mouth of Fernando Pass on opening day, November 5,
1913. At the time of its completion it was the longest aqueduct in the world. It could transport 258
million gallons of water every day, all by power-free gravity flow. The hydroelectric power
generated in San Francisquito Canyon would eventually pay for the entire project. It was a project
that dominated western newspapers for six consecutive years, and was an accomplishment which
drew notice the world over. Mulholland’s Los Angeles had done something no other major city had
accomplished previously: they had constructed a water supply infrastructure capable of sustaining
anticipated growth ahead of their burgeoning population base. This was without precedent in all of
human history. At the time of its completion (1913) nobody believed that Los Angeles would ever
displace San Francisco as the State’s largest, wealthiest, and most populace city.
The aqueduct's completion brought a unceasing stream of praise to Mulholland. Newspaper
editors urged Mulholland's candidacy for Mayor, and the University of California bestowed an
honorary doctorate upon him in June 1914. But, Mulholland had little interest in politics, and
crowds roared with laughter when, in response to a question about his possible candidacy, he
responded: "Gentlemen, I would rather give birth to a porcupine backwards than be mayor of Los
Angeles" (Nadeau, 1993; p. 49). His humorous response was the quintessential personification of
the "Chief," his nom de guerre within the Bureau of Waterworks and Supply (Van Norman, 1935).

Short-term Impacts. The pueblo’s thirsts were quenched, at least for a while. Between 1900-1920
the City’s population quintupled, to 576,000. From 1918 onward the City was growing in excess of
100,000 people per year. During the initial efforts to secure Owens River water in 1906, President
Theodore Roosevelt had intervened on the issue over the abandonment of the Reclamation Service's
plan for the Owens Valley. Roosevelt had sided with the City on the grounds that no water from the
aqueduct would be ever be offered to private interests for resale as irrigation water outside of the
City's limits. This alerted the real estate speculators who had purchased land in the semi-arid San
Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles proper. These speculators began pushing for annexation of
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the valley between 1914-1923, which quadrupled the land area of Los Angeles, to 407 mi (in 1913
only 3,000 acres had been under cultivation in the valley, but by 1917, that figure had jumped to
75,000 acres).

ANOTHER DROUGHT

During the aqueduct's first year of operation Los Angeles received 23.65 inches of rainfall, about

160% of normal. But, precipitation levels began falling soon after the November 1918 World War
Armistice. The 1918-19 water year was a near-record low, only 6.67 inches of rain. This gave
everyone a scare, but relief soon came with two successive years of above-average rainfall. The
post-war land boom was in full blossom when a series of abnormally dry years commenced in

World Environmental and Water Resources Congress 2017