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"admirable in conception and outline" in their report released during the fall of 1906. Few
engineers dared to criticize the project after the panel's review was released, due in large part to the
clout and credibility of John R. Freeman, one of the principal consultants for New York’s New
Croton Aqueduct.

Final Plans and Construction. The aqueduct intake was intended to divert water from the Owens
River at a pair of headgates about 12 miles north of Independence, at an elevation of 3714 feet (Fig.
4). Whenever Owens Lake filled to capacity, the overflow continued southward, sculpting the lower
Owens Gorge, intermittently flowing through Rose Valley, across a series of lava dams at Little
Lake, into Indian Wells Valley, which contains China Lake at its eastern end. It was in this channel
just above the lower Owens Gorge waterfalls that Mulholland decided to build the principal storage
and regulation reservoir, known as Haiwee Dam and Reservoir (Fig. 5). With a storage capacity of
almost 60,000 acre-feet, Haiwee controlled discharge entering the covered sections and sag pipe
crossings between the Owens Valley and Mojave.

Figure 4. Profile of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, between Loing Valley Dam/Crowley Lake (A)
and Sawtelle (14), just north of the downtown area (LOC-HAER).

From its intake north of Independence south to Haiwee the aqueduct was constructed mostly
as an open channel. South of Haiwee the Owens Valley narrows and the crosses increasingly
rugged country. In this area most of the aqueduct was built as a cut-and-cover box channel. The
flatter sections were excavated using rail-mounted steam shovels and immediately lined with
concrete. This system advanced at an average rate of about four miles per month. The life blood of
the project was a standard gage rail line constructed by the Southern Pacific Railroad between May

1908 and October 1910, extending northward from Mojave to the Owens Valley. 320,000 tons of
construction hardware would be carried along this line before the aqueduct was finished.
More than a million barrels of Portland cement was needed to line the canals, tunnels and
cut-and-cover sections. J. B. Lippincott (1913) engaged in some local geologic studies and discov-

World Environmental and Water Resources Congress 2017