Extended Interview

Mike Prather Owens Valley Outreach Coordinator   Read more extended interviews.

This interview has not been edited for content.

Mike Prather:  This is an area of the Owen's Valley called Pine Springs.  It's an area that at one time in the 1960's was an area of green lushness—water near the surface supporting acres and acres of bunch grasses and vegetation.  In an effort to fill the second Los Angeles aqueduct in 1970, there was massive ground water pumping in this area and other areas in the Owens Valley that resulted in the water tables dropping and the loss of vegetation, the invasion of weeds, the creation of a large regional dust problem in the valley.  An example of the some of the bunch grasses that have been destroyed is right below me here.  This is a bunch grass called alkali sacaton.  It is wide-spread in the Great Basin.  This would normally be up to the belly of a horse with large plumes, and solid masses of bunch grasses, which supported lots of wildlife and kept the dust down.  Most of these have died since 1970 when the pumps came on.  We have bare ground in between and we can tell by the dark soils that we had a lot of organics here.  We can tell the pictures from the past by analyzing the soil as well as the skeletons of the dead plants.  We have the invasion of weeds, like Russian thistle, which is not a fair trade.  It is something to be avoided anywhere else in the world where it can be.  Below me here is a bunch grass.  This is a skeleton of a bunch grass called alkali sacaton.  You can see that it's gone and there is bare ground amongst the skeletons in the invasion of Russian thistle—a real ecological tragedy—violence to a natural world.
Where I'm walking right here are the pools where Hind Springs had been up until 1970.  The water at that time would have been about up to my shoulders.  This is Hind Springs that was pumped to extinction around 1970 to fill the second Los Angeles aqueduct.  This area held not only this pond but several slews that flowed for a mile or two that were up to waist deep supporting all kinds of wildlife.  What happened when the ground water was pumped here is this spring was pumped to extinction.  I'm surrounded by weeds and the skeletons of mature willows.  This spring will never come back, even when the pumps go off.  These springs have all cemented up inside and the flows will not resume.  When you lose a spring, it's gone. 
I'm walking across the bottom of what was the pool at Hinds Springs.  This is one of the Owens Valley smaller springs.  It was pumped to extinction by the city of Los Angeles in 1970 to fill the second aqueduct.  The water would have been about up to my shoulders.  There was not only a pool here, but there were also slews that went down towards the Owens River supporting all kinds of wildlife and different vegetation types.  What I'm surrounded with now is just the ultimate sadness; the skeletons of dead mature willow trees and the straw-colored plants are just invasive weeds.  It's something that has to be avoided because these springs don't come back.  They cement up inside and even after the wells are turned off, the waters will not resume flowing at these springs.  They are gone forever.  These dead skeletons around the pool of Hines Springs were mature willows.  The size of them, maybe they were sixty to ninety years old at the time the pumps came on in 1970 and destroyed the spring.  This was an oasis in the desert, if you can imagine that—a very valuable thing.  Ground water pumps, when they come on, they lower the water table.  It's like a bank account.  They withdraw more money than you're earning.  Snow melts in these mountains and moves underground through these lava flows, through the soil until it hits some impermeable surface, comes to the top and we call it a spring.  It's a very simple thing.  And if you withdraw more water than is coming, then these places go extinct and the damage is forever.  I'm walking along the skeletons of mature willows that grew around the pool here at Hind's springs.  These willows looked to be sixty to ninety years old.  They existed because water came through the ground here.  Snow melts in these mountains and moves underground until it hits something where it can't flow anymore and it comes to the surface and we call it a spring.  It's a very simple thing.  It's much like your bank account, however, if you begin to take more water through pumping than water is coming in in recharge, then you begin to lose.  Bankruptcy here is the extinction of the spring that is gone forever.  The wildlife has depended on it, the beauty, the dust created in terms of human health problems—just a completely negative situation. What happened in the Owens Valley and its significance of it's history can help us learn about the present, especially in Nevada, is that a large city (an urban area far away) took water from here.  At first it was surface water, then in 1970 they began massive ground water pumping.  And because of that pumping there has been significant damage to vegetation throughout areas in the Owens Valley and many of these may never be healed.  In terms of local people and the economies, when you lose your water, you've lost your future and you have certainly lost many of the choices and the opportunities, some that you may not even know about in the future.  When the city of Los Angeles took water south in 1913, they took all of the streams that flowed into the Owens River.  The Owens River would no longer flow into Owens Lake and it began to dry so it was 110 square miles of alkaline lake, a typical Great Basin lake.  The river ended there.  Over the course of about ten years this lake that had huge importance for wildlife and migration, it also suppressed dust by covering it's bottom.  It disappeared.  By the 1920's Owens Lake was gone.  Much of the water history in the Eastern Sierra in terms of the good news, started at Mono Lake.  At Mono Lake the Mono Lake committee was able to do secure flows in the streams that will raise the level of Mono Lake—cover some of the dust-prone areas, and protect the eco-system there.  Because of those efforts, I think that added or gave encouragement to others of us who live along the aqueduct, and in the Owens Valley certainly we've needed that encouragement.  Many of the people in our communities have accepted that there is no hope.  We feel there is hope and the Owens Valley committee has shown that there is hope—that we've had significant victories and we've continued to make slow progress. 
When you live in a rural area and you deal with a very very large city, especially one that is quite powerful within our state, (I'm talking about the city of Los Angeles here and in Nevada they'd be talking about Las Vegas) it is difficult to open doors, it's difficult to have people not think that you're just rural people making noise and not enough to bother with, a bunch of hillbillies.  It takes years to find people that have the power to make decisions that will listen to you and then to have decisions follow that actually help your area.  It depends on mayor to mayor here, the city council, but meetings we've had down in Los Angeles and visits we've had with leaders up here in the Owens Valley often we just have to spend all of our time educating people about what's even going on here.  There's a 75-mile an hour trip up highway 395, they aren't aware of much of anything besides snow in the mountains, their backs are to the valley, they're thinking of skiing.
The history of the Owens Valley does parallel a lot with what's going on in Nevada right now.  It's something that I never thought I would see happen, but I think I was just simply naïve or not very bright.  We see, once again a hundred years later, a large city far away proposing, planning to take water from rural areas.  When you take water from rural areas, like I said earlier, you take away their future.  You take away their independence.  It is environmentally and socially not a just thing to do.  The way I see it is that we have the city of Los Angeles, the most powerful city in California that has huge influence in Sacramento, our state capitol.  In Nevada you have Las Vegas, which effectively and certainly in terms of money going towards land and water, they're making the decisions.  They're electing governors, and the governor appoints the state water engineer and it doesn't take too much math to figure which way the water is going to go or which way is downhill.

Interviewer:  What advice do you have for the ranchers in Snake Valley and White Pine and the residents there?

Mike Prather:  The advice I would have for anyone living in rural Nevada where the Southern Nevada Water Authority has filed for water, is to resist it in every possible way—to deal with it in terms of simple justice and fairness, that you cannot take away water from one area--something that is worth something in terms of beauty, life, economic vitality and future options, and take that away.  The water may belong to everyone in the state in Nevada that is under White Pine County and elsewhere but it most affects the people that live there and I think we need to fight it in terms of fighting environmental impact statements, fight it legally, fight it in the state house in Carson City, try to bring it to life within in the city of Las Vegas, to what is happening and how a small ground, an underdog (you know an underdog is something in America—we fight for underdogs) we should not allow people to just run roughshod over rural areas in Nevada—people like from Las Vegas without them knowing what they've done.  If after seeing all of the facts, and the things that are going to happen if they choose to do it, then that can't be helped.  They need to be educated and shamed if necessary.

Interviewer:  Mike what are we seeing in the aqueduct?  Where does the water come from and where is it going?

Mike Prather:  By me is the Los Angeles aqueduct that is carrying the water 230 miles down to the city of Los Angeles.  The portion that is behind and under me is a part that was actually dug.  It's a man-made canal that was dug.  Upstream it diverts the Owens River, the entire volume of the Owens River into this dug ditch then onto Los Angeles.  So in our valley we lost about 62 miles of the lower Owens River--it dried up and then the lake also.  This carries pumped water as well as surface water.  With surface water the great volume is the snow melt every May and June. 

Interviewer:  Tell me who owns this water?

Mike Prather:  In the state of California water is owned by the property owner.  In other words, in our valley here, where most of the entire valley (240,000 acres is owned by the city of Los Angeles), they own the water underneath it, so they can pump that water.  In our case they can also export that water and there is virtually no limit unless some environmental damage is going to occur where we do have legal tools, like the California Environmental Quality Act that we can use here.  In Nevada the case is different where there is a state water engineer that determines how the water will be used.  These large projects, I guess the water is held in trust by the state of Nevada and this single person appointed by the governor makes the decision on how projects are going to be put together and whether they're going to go forward or not.

Interviewer:  How were the water rights in Owens Valley acquired?

Mike Prather:  Well the city of Los Angeles around 1905 was faced with a shortfall of water.  They had a booming population.  They had a lot of boosters in terms of real estate and economic industry down there even then still today, and they were looking around for where they could get more water and they found the Owens Valley.   So they began to buy ranches that were along streams, along the river, and places that were along the canals--eventually all of the canal companies, and slowly bought out land.  A lot of it before the first aqueduct was completed in 1913.  Since they held the rights to that land they also owned the water and the rights underneath that land, and they can pump it or divert it at will.

What you're hearing and seeing here is the sound of money.  This water makes land have value.  There is a lot of money in the city of Los Angeles and that value is magnified if there is water added.  This is a deep aquifer monitoring well.  It goes down approximately three to five hundred feet.  It's sealed in certain sections and it has perforations in others so it can take water at different depths.  When pumps come on, water levels can be measured here, the behavior of the water in a sense.  Computer models can be made so you can try to understand what happens underground when these pumps come on. 
(Repeats)  This is the sound of money.  This is a deep aquifer monitoring well.  It's purpose is to measure how the water behaves when production wells go on—when the pumps go on.  This well has a depth of three, four, five hundred feet.  It has perforations at different levels that can take water and also measure water and see what it's behavior is when pumps go on and off.  From that data, if there is enough of these wells in different directions around the production wells, you can make computer models and hopefully try to understand how water behaves underground.

Interview:  Tell us what we're seeing behind us with the Owens River, sometimes it's dry, but not necessarily today, and what did it look like originally?

Mike Prather:  Well I'm standing at the bottom of the lower Owens River.  In the old days before the first diversion for the Los Angeles aqueduct, this river would flow bank to bank and during the snow run-off in May and June would spill over the banks and really recharge not only the ground water but also spread the lush vegetation this valley had.
At times now days, since the 1913 diversion, this will often be quite dry during the hot months.  The trickle today is maybe one cubic foot of water per second is what it looks like.  The very expensive re-watering project that takes place for the city would have a base-flow year round of about 40 cubic feet per second.

Interviewer:  Talk about taking water from the Owens River to Los Angeles, and the ramifications of what that dream has been.

Mike Prather:  Really Mulholland always had a great commitment to this city of Los Angeles.  He wanted the city to grow and fulfill it's destiny, and to do that it needed to have water and if the water was up here in the Owens Valley and if they could get it to Los Angeles, then that's where it should go.  It should be the greatest good for the greatest number.  The problem with that is it often tramples on the minority.  In the United States that's always the balance in democracy.  How do you not just go roughshod over the rural people?  I think in a modern day, where we've learned so much from mistakes of the past especially with the Owens Valley is that all cities need to live within their means.  We do that as families, living within our means, and if water is a limiting factor, then they need to deal with that.  If they need to use less, or more efficiently or whatever, use it over again, that's what they need to do.  They shouldn't just be able to go out into the rural areas where there are fewer people, and take away their current situation and their future.

Interviewer:  That's one of the arguments that we've heard, certainly in Las Vegas, is that the huge sacrifice of the rural for the many to benefit from the economy, talk about that.

Mike Prather:  I think the rural versus the urban conflict, where the majority feels that the sacrifice should be made by the few, I don't think that's really a valid argument, because they're really not arguing about jobs and economy for the current people in this city.  They're dealing with boosters and speculators.  They're dealing with people that want to increase the land base in those cities and that's a cancer.  There is simply no end to that.  There is no sign that any kind of real planning that has teeth takes place--that basically if enough money can come in the door for a new development, sometimes entirely new cities, then that's what they're boosting.  It's the same as it's always been, especially back in the '20s in the city of Los Angeles.  That kind of boom is taking place right now in Las Vegas and what Los Angeles had in the teens, the '20s and the '30s.  Los Angeles, the city proper, is built out now.  But Las Vegas can go in all directions.  They are to the point where they can influence federal land ownership—the transfer of land to the city so they can just have more and more growth.  They're not talking about growth for the current people.  They're talking about more and more people coming in.  Cities need to live within their means.  They need to work on densities, control traffic, cleaner air and more quality of life issues.