The norcal/socal divide caused by the river is funny to me. I grew up in LA, then moved to the Bay Area for college. In LA we never really talked about where our water comes from. But we were always 'in a drought' and always taught to conserve water.
My wife grew up in the Bay Area, and was told the same.
But her family is from Sacramento. Up until about 15 years ago, everyone in Sacramento paid the same for water (based on square footage of your home). There were no water meters. So they didn't conserve. They ran the sprinklers in 100 degree heat for hours, they washed sidewalks with water instead sweeping, and all the other things.
But when the meters came, her Uncle blamed SoCal for "stealing his water". He complained every month when the bill came about how he has to pay more now because of SoCal.
Owens valley, where LA "steals" water from, is on the eastern side of the Sierras.
NorCal, including Sacramento, is on the western side of the Sierras.
So unless they planned on pumping the water over/under the mountain range that surrounds it in every direction except for towards LA, that water was never available for any NorCal city to use.
The California Aqueduct delivers water from the western Sierras through the Central Valley and to Los Angeles. This is likely what NorCal refers to when they say SoCal is 'stealing our water'.
Owens valley is basically dried up from the water that LA takes. It's interesting as you drive in the towns in the Valley and you see all the LA Department of Water and Power offices over 200 miles from Los Angeles. The courts had to force the LA DWP to quit taking too much water from the streams that feed Mono Lake as it was in danger of drying out.
they are saying that LA takes water from sources which would otherwise drain into the sacramento and san joaquin river delta. The video from this post mentions the California State Water Project which takes water from the Feather River (Oroville Dam) and distributes it along the Western edge of the central valley South to Bakersfield where it is then pumped over the mountains both towards Los Angeles and further East to San Bernardino and Riverside. It provides way more water to SoCal than the two Los Angeles-specific aqueducts from the Owens Valley on the Eastern side of the Sierras.
Yes, Norcal spent decades wagging fingers at SoCal about this. There were books like Cadillac Desert.
Meanwhile, San Francisco drinks clean glacier water that a valley in Yosemite was destroyed to provide this and they refuse to repurpose a downstream damn that has enough capacity to do it.
Can you clarify what you mean by: “they refuse to repurpose a downstream dam”
California has insufficient water storage to meet demand, it’s not like we have huge dams lying around that we leave empty when there is water available to fill them.
You might be referring to Don Pedro dam - but we are already filling that up (modulo what we need to keep empty for flood control). SF has some contractual right they could possibly exercise to water in Don Pedro but that doesn’t magically result in California’s water supply being held constant if we stop storing water in the Hetch Hetchy. If SF gets the Don Pedro water, that means someone else that was going to get it is deprived.
Now, you could argue that the state can get by with lower storage because ag needs to consume less or more groundwater recharge or whatever, but that’s a different question.
Crystal Springs isnt anywhere near Yosemite if that is what you are referencing. That being said it supposedly was gorgeous and almost as amazing before being filled with water
I grew up in Sacramento and I remember when my parents were had a flat rate water bill. Those were the good ol' days!
It frustrates me how everyone moralizes water use rather than accepting that free markets allow for people who are simply willing to pay for it. For example, if you live in Sacrmanto and don't have a pool, you're just doing it all wrong (in my opinion, of course).
I watched my friend's family farm in Modesto flood their fields to irrigate them. No meter, just a valve off the canal and they pay a flat rate. So it offends me that my shower head is legally required to restrict it's flow. Or that neighbors decide that a pile of rock in the front yard is "better for the environment" as it radiates heat on a 105°F day...
Sometimes it feels like the US has lost its appetite for grand structural projects like that. Maybe it’s just that I’m unaware of them and that impression is the result of survival bias, but given how impossibly hard it is to just build anything where I live (Seattle), I’m not so sure.
Fair. Maybe I'm too much if the weeds of this because all I can think of is how much of a fight it was to pass ST2 and ST3 and how we haven't even started on the Ballard line despite voting for it in 2016 (10 years ago!) and how it might be delayed forever.
No, it's not an insane engineering achievement. It's just a normal one, because nobody else has floating bridges, nobody else needed it. It's also years late and costs 10x more than it should.
It's also the wrong stupid technology. The trains are constrained on space because of the low-floor bullshit. It's the longest light rail in the country, it's too fucking long and slow. Even if we fully built out ST3 it can't handle more than ~20% of commuters. It can't be expanded with express tracks because it's built deep underground, so the commute is so much slower than the equivalent in other countries and will NEVER compete with the automobile except during peak rush hour. The northern stations are next to the freeway so over half the land that could be transit-oriented development can't be, and then what's left is devoted to parking anyway. Complete, total waste of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, built and planned by people who don't and won't ever use transit.
That 10x cost directly makes it so we can't build out our system properly and we keep building out car infrastructure because people would rather have a car and save 2 hours a day commuting.
The achievement is the speed the train can run at. Trains going over the old floating railway bridges that were part of the Milwaukee Road had to slow down dramatically to, iirc, 6 mph.
Of course those were first built in the 19th century.
I don't think you're wrong. Every time someone says we can't do high speed rail it makes me very sad. And as far as Seattle goes... my commute is substantially affected by the I-5 closures. It's somewhat shocking to me that we allow infrastructure to decay as much as we do.
I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(
The commute is slow because the light rail is slow. It's the wrong technology for commuter rail and there are too many stops. (I'm assuming you live north).
Can't do highspeed rail because it's too impractical and expensive, while we're spending a west coast highspeed rail network worth of money on the least popular war in US history.
We're literally right now building a huge high speed rail project that is planned to link san diego to san francisco through LA, bakersfield and fresno. Progress is made on it daily. https://www.youtube.com/CAHighSpeedRail
If you watch the OP, you'll see that the construction of this aqueduct caused billions of dollars worth of environmental devastation. Rail all you want against regulations, but when an argument boils down to "I wish we didn't have to internalize all these costs and could just push them off on someone else", I'm not especially sympathetic.
Certainly that’s part of it, but also just NIMBYism. Los Angeles were able to defeat the Owen’s Valley farmers back then, I don’t think they would be now.
It’s too complicated to corruptly make money off of a large project like that. It’s much easier to just buy a bunch of drugs and needles and give it to the methheads, or spend money on homeless while building zero homes.
also they were completed during a time of much less housing density and eminent domain laws were more powerful - even getting a railroad setup nowadays costs billions because of land purchasing
Looking at what Tehran is facing (not related to the war, water shortage), I'm wondering why california isn't investing in more desalination for SoCal, especially for LA.
But there are only a few in SoCal and they're for smaller communities like carlsbad or santa barbara. So it is there and it is working for some, why not more? naturally i assume it's because everything costs more at the coast.
> I'm wondering why california isn't investing in more desalination for SoCal, especially for LA.
Because California has plenty of water for residents. What California doesn't have is plenty of water for agribusiness.
And the agribusinesses do NOT want people paying close attention as all the valid solutions to water problems are basically "shut down agribusinesses in arid areas".
people are always trying to conserve water, and droughts have been a plague for the past few decades. Even if the agriculture is taking up all the water, it doesn't change how water scarcity is a a very real part of socal life. You don't have to shutdown agriculture elsewhere, and it is a vital part of california's economy, that's just a lazy solution. I can get behind getting the agriculture industry to finance partly the desalination plants so they can free up the fresh water via the aqueduct.
In the unlikely event california becomes independent, water rights will be a big deal too, those natural water sources won't be so reliable without nevada's cooperation.
Because the economics of desalination require locking in long term purchase/production rates at prices that dwarf current and other sources of water.
SD's Poseidon desal is projected at ~$3.7k per acre ft for 2026 whereas SDCWA SWP water is ~$1.5-1.9k acre ft.
Leak fixes, groundwater recharge, local aquifers, water banking, potable reuse, etc. are all more economical means of bolstering water supply.
A big factor in determining desalination placement in the region are the groundwater basins. Limited size and availability makes the case for desalination as means for resiliency. Another is that situating adjacent to power plants so as to use their already coastally degraded intakes/outfalls. Doheny is to use subsurface slant wells for intakes, but it's also lower output too.
As for LA. they're working on getting their potable reuse plants/projects up and running. The largest indirect potable reuse plant in the world has been operating in OC for ~18 years. Lower operating costs than desalination, reduced wastewater discharge, and reduced coastal impact.
that's very insightful. But if I can dive a bit deeper, why can't desalination be made at a grander scale? why aren't desalination plants trying to fill up artificial lakes for example, where those lakes are also being topped-up with reused potables. Would it help if there were much larger nuclear powerplants in the desert that take in salt water via an aqueduct from the sea and send back fresh water to artificial lakes, depositing the waste into the desert? Salton sea might be a good enough spot in socal for example, where it is already toxic and salty.
The few times I've been to the Salton area, I was amazed at the agriculture in the middle of the desert, including things like citrus plants, despite smelling the stench of salton from there. There are various lakes that dry up all the time like big bear, what would it take to keep such basins capable of sustaining fresh watter topped up with desalinated fresh water, instead of directly consuming it? In other words, making desalination an upstream element, with the goal of resisting drought overall, not just immediate fresh water supply.
I've ever wondered about places like death valley, if the elevation there is so low, is it easier to build geothermal plants that could desalinate at a greater rate there?
And since I'm asking dumb questions already, if an aqueduct to LA is possible at a 4 hour driving distance, then I know it would be costly, but is it that impractical to build an aqueduct from the great lakes, which have no shortage of fresh water, and evaporation loss could easily be recouped by the sheer volume of available fresh water supply.
I don't understand the financial concern at all. How could increasing the water supply increase the price? It only makes sense to me if the price is artificially low right now.
Environmental damage by a desalinization plant couldn't possibly be worse than overdrawing the acquifer -- the defacto solution.
As part of the contract for construction, the county or city must buy a certain amount of water every year.
Because desalination is not economically feasible, the water is more expensive and this extra subsidy raises the cost of the water bill.
This is how it works for the facility in San Diego County.
Building a desalination facility is economically hard to justify because the break-even point seems far away. It also assumes the state won’t eventually create a state-wide solution, which would benefit from a state-level economy of scale that a city/county effort might not.
Water is normally "free" from mother nature. Desalinated water is not free as it cost energy to get the clean water. Even if there's a pump to get water from aquifers into the water system, that still rounds to free compared to the cost of running a desalination plant.
I’m in a rare community in Southern California (part of north county San Diego) where my water is 27% from the ocean (10% for rest of San Diego county).
It’s cool. Still totally hard and makes everything fail early.
It would pay for itself after a few flooding events where were are able to redistribute the water more quickly. It also provides clean energy storage.
I've posted about it before with links to the studies but it usually just starts an argument by people worried the rest of the country is going to steal their water...
It seems like the least efficient way to solve the problem. Theres lots of water in many places in the US, if water is just allowed to be priced by how scarce it is in California, maybe people will move to a place where it’s not such a big deal.
Being from LA, I am used to a water system that works without needing power. I think most of CA is like that. It was a surprise to lose the water back east when the power went out during a storm.
The only places I've heard of losing water during power outages are houses that use a private well (no power, no well pump), which would be the case anywhere. Municipal water systems may or may not use power to provide pressure, but are going to have generator power outside of the most severe outages.
I wonder if this was in an apartment building. We owned a condo in a 5 story (4+1) apartment building and because it was taller than the San Jose water system was built for, our building needed (electric) pumps to provide water pressure to the building (there were tanks on the roof). If we lost power, then we lost water.
Now that we have moved to a 2 floor detached home (also in San Jose) we do not have that issue, and everything is gravity fed.
Some of the aqueducts that deliver some of the water to LA do rely on pumping. But, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which is the subject of this post, does not. The LA Aqueduct is entirely gravity driven, and under normal circumstances it is sufficient to supply LA's water needs.
Another nitpick is that California's various aqueducts are net producers of electricity (i.e., after accounting for pumping), so, while some of them do rely on electricity, they do not require an external source of power to operate.
It depends where you are. Most cities in the Northeast you are correct. But coastal areas, big swaths of New Jersey and Long Island IIRC are definitely dependent on power. Towns with water towers usually pump it from the ground.
Alot of suburbs that can't or won't hook into city supplies will sometimes need more active measures to filter their water as well.
I know NYC doesn't treat their water at all, but LA doesn't either?
My city runs on surface water, so we have treatment and then pump to storage tanks. You would have to be out for quite a while to run the city out of water, though - the tanks are large.
LA definitely treats the water. Both the surface water before consumption (I'd be surprised if any city doesn't do this) and the wastewater, for reclamation for nonportable use like irrigation, and for recycling back into the general clean water supply.
The aqueduct water is specifically purified by the Los Angeles Aqueduct Filtration Plant. That plant is gravity fed, but it doesn't operate without power.
LA just has the advantage of having mountains in the city, so it's cheaper building more elevated water storage so the capacity lasts longer during power interruptions (which are also not as common or extended as they are in the east). They will still eventually run out if they're not replenished by powered pumps.
Where did you get that idea about NYC water being untreated? NYC treats its water. Chlorine is added if and when needed. Testing stations exist to evaluate water quality all around the boroughs, etc.
You can't have a city of millions of people and have the water be potable from the tap without testing and treatment
There is no water scarcity in California, only misallocation. The vast majority of our water is heavily subsidized and used for agriculture, and a substantial amount of those crops are grown for export, yet agricultural exports makes up an insignificant part of California's economy.
We could end all California water scarcity talk today, with no impact to food availability for Americans, by curtailing the international export of just two California crops: almonds and alfalfa.
Anecdotally, my friend's grandma was an almond farmer. As they drove past a river in the Central Valley, she exclaimed "Why is there water in that river?! Those could be watering my almond trees!"
I hear about the almonds a lot. Are they more water-intensive than other tree nuts? Are they not commonly grown elsewhere in the world? All I really know about them is that they seem kinda nice, but not really worth the cost.
So why hasn’t that been done? Have some representatives and senators set limits on almond exports. Surely they wouldn’t be voted out in the next election given how farmers are outnumbered.
Almonds are climate-appropriate product and valuable. Alfalfa can cheaply be grown off rainwater in the Midwest and it alone frees up sufficient water.
The Owens river gorge has the highest concentration of sport climbs anywhere in North America, but there's not much variation, they're mostly edge ladders on weirdly slippery rock.
Not far away are the world's most photogenic boulders, the Buttermilks, and when I visited (from Canada) I was surprised to find that the boulders are on LA municipal property and the pipe that takes Owen's River's water over the Sierras is nearby.
I love Practical Engineering. Grady Hillhouse's enthusiasm for engineering shows through brilliantly. Being a graduate engineer, I've learned a lot from his videos and transcriptions. Well worth browsing practical.engineering.
There's a poem carved into the stonework of Washington Union Station, part of the art installation The Progress of Railroading from c. 1909:
the old mechanic arts / controlling new forces / build new highways / for goods and men / override the ocean / and make the very ether / carry human thought
the desert shall rejoice / and blossom as the rose
Came here to post this. Dam good book on the shifty maneuvering that resulted in the Owens Valley Diversion and ultimately the population center that is LA.
I was surprised to find out it was largely uncovered, though I guess it probably makes it much cheaper to construct. I usually think of aqueducts as pipes or tunnels, like Persian qanāts. I wonder how much water is lost due to evaporation.
There's some testing to see how covering open irrigation canals with solar panels which would reduce evaporation and generate power
> Their analysis found that putting solar panels over the 4,000 miles of California’s open canals could save up to 63 billion gallons of water annually
> could save up to 63 billion gallons of water annually
To put it into perspective, 63 billion gallons is 193340 acre-feet, which is 0.5% of california's water use (a bit under 40 millions acre-feet). That's a tenth the water consumption of lawns, which is 1/15th the water consumption of agriculture.
Thanks! I forgot that article, but now I remember that I read or skimmed it when it made the rounds last year. It's actually where I first learned that the aqueducts were uncovered!
Am curious, how have the shade balls been working out in terms of maintenance, coating wear, leeched microplastics, containment (so they don't wind up in oceans), etc? In retrospect, did it make sense compared to the $250M or so uplift it would have taken to build a conventional roof?
The graphical aids in practical engineering videos are quite well done, especially when he creates scale models in the garage. You are missing out if you only read it, if you can afford to spend the time watching.
Nothing prevents inserting video clips — or, for that matter, interactive demos or other media — into the flow of a blog post. Youtube incentivizes its "creators" to optimize for view time, so even the most respected channels can be quite redundant in their presentation. And even when it's well edited and "organized", it doesn't necessarily prioritize what would be most useful.
Correct it's massively energy intensive to filter the salt out the newest best ideas still use ~2 KWh/m3 of water and that's a lab system in perdue that batches the process instead of having it run continuously which is why current RO desalination systems require so much energy.
For usage where the water mostly returns as sewage, is treated and then returned to the ocean, you can just dilute the brine with the treated discharge and then it returns at basically the original salinity.
Reminds me of when I was talking to friends about the film Chinatown and I referred to it as a movie about the California water war and someone else said “dude, that’s not what that film is about”.
Is it really considered the Cascades all the way down near LA? I thought the mountains down there were the Sierra Nevada? Did Grady just get that detail wrong, or am I wrong in thinking that the Cascades stops in Northern California?
Growing up in LA, I was fascinated as a kid watching the water flow down this aqueduct. Anytime we drove by it on the way to Magic Mountain, I'd hope that it would be a water-on day.
The norcal/socal divide caused by the river is funny to me. I grew up in LA, then moved to the Bay Area for college. In LA we never really talked about where our water comes from. But we were always 'in a drought' and always taught to conserve water.
My wife grew up in the Bay Area, and was told the same.
But her family is from Sacramento. Up until about 15 years ago, everyone in Sacramento paid the same for water (based on square footage of your home). There were no water meters. So they didn't conserve. They ran the sprinklers in 100 degree heat for hours, they washed sidewalks with water instead sweeping, and all the other things.
But when the meters came, her Uncle blamed SoCal for "stealing his water". He complained every month when the bill came about how he has to pay more now because of SoCal.
Owens valley, where LA "steals" water from, is on the eastern side of the Sierras.
NorCal, including Sacramento, is on the western side of the Sierras.
So unless they planned on pumping the water over/under the mountain range that surrounds it in every direction except for towards LA, that water was never available for any NorCal city to use.
The California Aqueduct delivers water from the western Sierras through the Central Valley and to Los Angeles. This is likely what NorCal refers to when they say SoCal is 'stealing our water'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct
Would be interesting to see the relative amounts of use by LA and by agriculture in the Central Valley though.
4 replies →
Owens valley is basically dried up from the water that LA takes. It's interesting as you drive in the towns in the Valley and you see all the LA Department of Water and Power offices over 200 miles from Los Angeles. The courts had to force the LA DWP to quit taking too much water from the streams that feed Mono Lake as it was in danger of drying out.
9 replies →
they are saying that LA takes water from sources which would otherwise drain into the sacramento and san joaquin river delta. The video from this post mentions the California State Water Project which takes water from the Feather River (Oroville Dam) and distributes it along the Western edge of the central valley South to Bakersfield where it is then pumped over the mountains both towards Los Angeles and further East to San Bernardino and Riverside. It provides way more water to SoCal than the two Los Angeles-specific aqueducts from the Owens Valley on the Eastern side of the Sierras.
2 replies →
LA also gets water from the state water project which does come from northern california: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/Ca...
Old men yelling at the sky don't often seek rationality or nuance in their cries.
Yes, Norcal spent decades wagging fingers at SoCal about this. There were books like Cadillac Desert.
Meanwhile, San Francisco drinks clean glacier water that a valley in Yosemite was destroyed to provide this and they refuse to repurpose a downstream damn that has enough capacity to do it.
Physician, heal thyself.
Can you clarify what you mean by: “they refuse to repurpose a downstream dam”
California has insufficient water storage to meet demand, it’s not like we have huge dams lying around that we leave empty when there is water available to fill them.
You might be referring to Don Pedro dam - but we are already filling that up (modulo what we need to keep empty for flood control). SF has some contractual right they could possibly exercise to water in Don Pedro but that doesn’t magically result in California’s water supply being held constant if we stop storing water in the Hetch Hetchy. If SF gets the Don Pedro water, that means someone else that was going to get it is deprived.
Now, you could argue that the state can get by with lower storage because ag needs to consume less or more groundwater recharge or whatever, but that’s a different question.
1 reply →
Crystal Springs isnt anywhere near Yosemite if that is what you are referencing. That being said it supposedly was gorgeous and almost as amazing before being filled with water
7 replies →
I grew up in Sacramento and I remember when my parents were had a flat rate water bill. Those were the good ol' days!
It frustrates me how everyone moralizes water use rather than accepting that free markets allow for people who are simply willing to pay for it. For example, if you live in Sacrmanto and don't have a pool, you're just doing it all wrong (in my opinion, of course).
I watched my friend's family farm in Modesto flood their fields to irrigate them. No meter, just a valve off the canal and they pay a flat rate. So it offends me that my shower head is legally required to restrict it's flow. Or that neighbors decide that a pile of rock in the front yard is "better for the environment" as it radiates heat on a 105°F day...
Sometimes it feels like the US has lost its appetite for grand structural projects like that. Maybe it’s just that I’m unaware of them and that impression is the result of survival bias, but given how impossibly hard it is to just build anything where I live (Seattle), I’m not so sure.
Seattle just got done building light rail tracks over a floating bridge.
It is an insane engineering achievement. A train literally running on tracks on a road that is floating on water!
Fair. Maybe I'm too much if the weeds of this because all I can think of is how much of a fight it was to pass ST2 and ST3 and how we haven't even started on the Ballard line despite voting for it in 2016 (10 years ago!) and how it might be delayed forever.
No, it's not an insane engineering achievement. It's just a normal one, because nobody else has floating bridges, nobody else needed it. It's also years late and costs 10x more than it should.
It's also the wrong stupid technology. The trains are constrained on space because of the low-floor bullshit. It's the longest light rail in the country, it's too fucking long and slow. Even if we fully built out ST3 it can't handle more than ~20% of commuters. It can't be expanded with express tracks because it's built deep underground, so the commute is so much slower than the equivalent in other countries and will NEVER compete with the automobile except during peak rush hour. The northern stations are next to the freeway so over half the land that could be transit-oriented development can't be, and then what's left is devoted to parking anyway. Complete, total waste of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, built and planned by people who don't and won't ever use transit.
That 10x cost directly makes it so we can't build out our system properly and we keep building out car infrastructure because people would rather have a car and save 2 hours a day commuting.
3 replies →
The achievement is the speed the train can run at. Trains going over the old floating railway bridges that were part of the Milwaukee Road had to slow down dramatically to, iirc, 6 mph.
Of course those were first built in the 19th century.
I get that it is neat but it's hardly the Hoover dam is it?
4 replies →
I don't think you're wrong. Every time someone says we can't do high speed rail it makes me very sad. And as far as Seattle goes... my commute is substantially affected by the I-5 closures. It's somewhat shocking to me that we allow infrastructure to decay as much as we do.
I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(
The commute is slow because the light rail is slow. It's the wrong technology for commuter rail and there are too many stops. (I'm assuming you live north).
(more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457884)
Can't do highspeed rail because it's too impractical and expensive, while we're spending a west coast highspeed rail network worth of money on the least popular war in US history.
2 replies →
Evidently tax cuts for the wealthy are more important than infrastructure.
You mean, like NYC Water Tunnel #3? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No....
We're literally right now building a huge high speed rail project that is planned to link san diego to san francisco through LA, bakersfield and fresno. Progress is made on it daily. https://www.youtube.com/CAHighSpeedRail
And when did that project start and how much has it cost and how far can you ride on what they've completed up until now?
That may be true for some twisted definition of "building". Most people would say the money is simply being wasted by bureaucrats, consultancies, etc.
Rejoice. It will be the world’s slowest and most expensive “high speed” rail.
So slow, in fact, many countries have faster regular rail.
This is a joke, right?
Progress is made on it daily? Great. How soon can I ride it?
5 replies →
Comments like these make me think, wow this place is no better than Reddit
Those projects would literally be impossible today with the environmental regulations in place, especially in California.
If you watch the OP, you'll see that the construction of this aqueduct caused billions of dollars worth of environmental devastation. Rail all you want against regulations, but when an argument boils down to "I wish we didn't have to internalize all these costs and could just push them off on someone else", I'm not especially sympathetic.
1 reply →
Certainly that’s part of it, but also just NIMBYism. Los Angeles were able to defeat the Owen’s Valley farmers back then, I don’t think they would be now.
It’s too complicated to corruptly make money off of a large project like that. It’s much easier to just buy a bunch of drugs and needles and give it to the methheads, or spend money on homeless while building zero homes.
This particular grand structural project was never a good idea, as the video describes. So it might not be the best basis for comparison.
The grand projects the US has embarked on have been completed using unethical means and without regard for real environmental consequences.
also they were completed during a time of much less housing density and eminent domain laws were more powerful - even getting a railroad setup nowadays costs billions because of land purchasing
Looking at what Tehran is facing (not related to the war, water shortage), I'm wondering why california isn't investing in more desalination for SoCal, especially for LA.
I see some here:
https://lynceans.org/all-posts/status-of-desalination-plants...
But there are only a few in SoCal and they're for smaller communities like carlsbad or santa barbara. So it is there and it is working for some, why not more? naturally i assume it's because everything costs more at the coast.
> I'm wondering why california isn't investing in more desalination for SoCal, especially for LA.
Because California has plenty of water for residents. What California doesn't have is plenty of water for agribusiness.
And the agribusinesses do NOT want people paying close attention as all the valid solutions to water problems are basically "shut down agribusinesses in arid areas".
people are always trying to conserve water, and droughts have been a plague for the past few decades. Even if the agriculture is taking up all the water, it doesn't change how water scarcity is a a very real part of socal life. You don't have to shutdown agriculture elsewhere, and it is a vital part of california's economy, that's just a lazy solution. I can get behind getting the agriculture industry to finance partly the desalination plants so they can free up the fresh water via the aqueduct.
In the unlikely event california becomes independent, water rights will be a big deal too, those natural water sources won't be so reliable without nevada's cooperation.
2 replies →
Because the economics of desalination require locking in long term purchase/production rates at prices that dwarf current and other sources of water. SD's Poseidon desal is projected at ~$3.7k per acre ft for 2026 whereas SDCWA SWP water is ~$1.5-1.9k acre ft. Leak fixes, groundwater recharge, local aquifers, water banking, potable reuse, etc. are all more economical means of bolstering water supply.
A big factor in determining desalination placement in the region are the groundwater basins. Limited size and availability makes the case for desalination as means for resiliency. Another is that situating adjacent to power plants so as to use their already coastally degraded intakes/outfalls. Doheny is to use subsurface slant wells for intakes, but it's also lower output too.
As for LA. they're working on getting their potable reuse plants/projects up and running. The largest indirect potable reuse plant in the world has been operating in OC for ~18 years. Lower operating costs than desalination, reduced wastewater discharge, and reduced coastal impact.
that's very insightful. But if I can dive a bit deeper, why can't desalination be made at a grander scale? why aren't desalination plants trying to fill up artificial lakes for example, where those lakes are also being topped-up with reused potables. Would it help if there were much larger nuclear powerplants in the desert that take in salt water via an aqueduct from the sea and send back fresh water to artificial lakes, depositing the waste into the desert? Salton sea might be a good enough spot in socal for example, where it is already toxic and salty.
The few times I've been to the Salton area, I was amazed at the agriculture in the middle of the desert, including things like citrus plants, despite smelling the stench of salton from there. There are various lakes that dry up all the time like big bear, what would it take to keep such basins capable of sustaining fresh watter topped up with desalinated fresh water, instead of directly consuming it? In other words, making desalination an upstream element, with the goal of resisting drought overall, not just immediate fresh water supply.
I've ever wondered about places like death valley, if the elevation there is so low, is it easier to build geothermal plants that could desalinate at a greater rate there?
And since I'm asking dumb questions already, if an aqueduct to LA is possible at a 4 hour driving distance, then I know it would be costly, but is it that impractical to build an aqueduct from the great lakes, which have no shortage of fresh water, and evaporation loss could easily be recouped by the sheer volume of available fresh water supply.
1 reply →
There are environmental and financial concerns https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/05/california-desali...
I don't understand the financial concern at all. How could increasing the water supply increase the price? It only makes sense to me if the price is artificially low right now.
Environmental damage by a desalinization plant couldn't possibly be worse than overdrawing the acquifer -- the defacto solution.
As part of the contract for construction, the county or city must buy a certain amount of water every year.
Because desalination is not economically feasible, the water is more expensive and this extra subsidy raises the cost of the water bill.
This is how it works for the facility in San Diego County.
Building a desalination facility is economically hard to justify because the break-even point seems far away. It also assumes the state won’t eventually create a state-wide solution, which would benefit from a state-level economy of scale that a city/county effort might not.
2 replies →
Building an industrial facility in california is much more difficult and expensive due to numerous regulations.
Water is normally "free" from mother nature. Desalinated water is not free as it cost energy to get the clean water. Even if there's a pump to get water from aquifers into the water system, that still rounds to free compared to the cost of running a desalination plant.
1 reply →
I’m in a rare community in Southern California (part of north county San Diego) where my water is 27% from the ocean (10% for rest of San Diego county).
It’s cool. Still totally hard and makes everything fail early.
The US needs a national water grid.
It would pay for itself after a few flooding events where were are able to redistribute the water more quickly. It also provides clean energy storage.
I've posted about it before with links to the studies but it usually just starts an argument by people worried the rest of the country is going to steal their water...
It seems like the least efficient way to solve the problem. Theres lots of water in many places in the US, if water is just allowed to be priced by how scarce it is in California, maybe people will move to a place where it’s not such a big deal.
3 replies →
Being from LA, I am used to a water system that works without needing power. I think most of CA is like that. It was a surprise to lose the water back east when the power went out during a storm.
The only places I've heard of losing water during power outages are houses that use a private well (no power, no well pump), which would be the case anywhere. Municipal water systems may or may not use power to provide pressure, but are going to have generator power outside of the most severe outages.
Also, water towers. As long as the power isn't out long enough to deplete the tower.
Apartment buildings often have pumps to increase pressure in the basement. Without power, the higher floors lose water.
I wonder if this was in an apartment building. We owned a condo in a 5 story (4+1) apartment building and because it was taller than the San Jose water system was built for, our building needed (electric) pumps to provide water pressure to the building (there were tanks on the roof). If we lost power, then we lost water.
Now that we have moved to a 2 floor detached home (also in San Jose) we do not have that issue, and everything is gravity fed.
Do you lose water in the whole building, or just those apartments above the water-line?
2 replies →
The LA water system is dependent on power as a whole. There’s many pumping stations along the various aqueducts.
Some of the aqueducts that deliver some of the water to LA do rely on pumping. But, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which is the subject of this post, does not. The LA Aqueduct is entirely gravity driven, and under normal circumstances it is sufficient to supply LA's water needs.
Another nitpick is that California's various aqueducts are net producers of electricity (i.e., after accounting for pumping), so, while some of them do rely on electricity, they do not require an external source of power to operate.
We do not lose water on the east coast when the power goes out
It depends where you are. Most cities in the Northeast you are correct. But coastal areas, big swaths of New Jersey and Long Island IIRC are definitely dependent on power. Towns with water towers usually pump it from the ground.
Alot of suburbs that can't or won't hook into city supplies will sometimes need more active measures to filter their water as well.
Sanitary sewers are heavily dependent on power.
Odd. Most places use water towers to provide water pressure and have backup generators for the pumps that fill them.
I know NYC doesn't treat their water at all, but LA doesn't either?
My city runs on surface water, so we have treatment and then pump to storage tanks. You would have to be out for quite a while to run the city out of water, though - the tanks are large.
LA definitely treats the water. Both the surface water before consumption (I'd be surprised if any city doesn't do this) and the wastewater, for reclamation for nonportable use like irrigation, and for recycling back into the general clean water supply.
The aqueduct water is specifically purified by the Los Angeles Aqueduct Filtration Plant. That plant is gravity fed, but it doesn't operate without power.
LA just has the advantage of having mountains in the city, so it's cheaper building more elevated water storage so the capacity lasts longer during power interruptions (which are also not as common or extended as they are in the east). They will still eventually run out if they're not replenished by powered pumps.
Where did you get that idea about NYC water being untreated? NYC treats its water. Chlorine is added if and when needed. Testing stations exist to evaluate water quality all around the boroughs, etc.
You can't have a city of millions of people and have the water be potable from the tap without testing and treatment
6 replies →
I know NYC doesn't treat their water at all…
EDIT: I'm a dork an grabbed the wrong URL. Changed URL to a PDF for lack of better.
A major metro doesn’t treat its tap water? Where on earth did you get that crazy idea?
<old URL deleted>
https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/water/drinking-...
I'll save some digging: "Even without filtration, the water is carefully treated to reduce the risk of harmful microorganisms."
4 replies →
"Well There's Your Problem" on the collapse of the St Francis Dam, mentioned in Grady's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxLgM1vnuUA
Also I love when they refer to it as the "_First_ California Water Wars" in a grim realization of the future of water scarcity in the West
There is no water scarcity in California, only misallocation. The vast majority of our water is heavily subsidized and used for agriculture, and a substantial amount of those crops are grown for export, yet agricultural exports makes up an insignificant part of California's economy.
We could end all California water scarcity talk today, with no impact to food availability for Americans, by curtailing the international export of just two California crops: almonds and alfalfa.
Anecdotally, my friend's grandma was an almond farmer. As they drove past a river in the Central Valley, she exclaimed "Why is there water in that river?! Those could be watering my almond trees!"
In Arizona we grow alfalfa as well -- it's mind boggling to me that in places where water is so scarce we use so much of it on such a low value crop.
1 reply →
I hear about the almonds a lot. Are they more water-intensive than other tree nuts? Are they not commonly grown elsewhere in the world? All I really know about them is that they seem kinda nice, but not really worth the cost.
So why hasn’t that been done? Have some representatives and senators set limits on almond exports. Surely they wouldn’t be voted out in the next election given how farmers are outnumbered.
2 replies →
Almonds are climate-appropriate product and valuable. Alfalfa can cheaply be grown off rainwater in the Midwest and it alone frees up sufficient water.
3 replies →
to put this to numbers... the exports are just about 0.5% of california's GDP. so yeah pretty much a rounding error.
2 replies →
Also this https://youtu.be/5erVH-zk7Uk?si=kDEFEtltdyhp6Nen
Why is that picture an extreme recolor of the original?
https://images.nebula.tv/5ba7e541-f57c-44cc-a91d-6a89bad158d...
To make people click.
Thank you, I was so confused by the obvious clickbait! I love Grady's videos, but yikes.
I said this in another comment, but I feel it's edited to look like water he uses in his garage demos with that blue glitter.
I was in Owens River Gorge last week, it's a very interesting place. It has some of the tallest single pitch rock climbing in the world, sometimes requiring 80M ropes: https://www.mountainproject.com/area/105843226/owens-river-g...
The Owens river gorge has the highest concentration of sport climbs anywhere in North America, but there's not much variation, they're mostly edge ladders on weirdly slippery rock.
Not far away are the world's most photogenic boulders, the Buttermilks, and when I visited (from Canada) I was surprised to find that the boulders are on LA municipal property and the pipe that takes Owen's River's water over the Sierras is nearby.
I love Practical Engineering. Grady Hillhouse's enthusiasm for engineering shows through brilliantly. Being a graduate engineer, I've learned a lot from his videos and transcriptions. Well worth browsing practical.engineering.
PS: and it is NOT about software engineering LOL!
There's a poem carved into the stonework of Washington Union Station, part of the art installation The Progress of Railroading from c. 1909:
the old mechanic arts / controlling new forces / build new highways / for goods and men / override the ocean / and make the very ether / carry human thought
the desert shall rejoice / and blossom as the rose
> the desert shall rejoice / and blossom as the rose
Or, rewritten for the Los Angeles Aqueduct:
the desert shall wither / and blossom in a plume of dust [1]
[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-06-19/owens-v...
If anyone wants a deep dive on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert
Or another kind of take:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071315/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8...
(Chinatown)
Or another kind of take:
Land of Little Rain by Mary Hunter Austin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91707.The_Land_of_Little...
Came here to post this. Dam good book on the shifty maneuvering that resulted in the Owens Valley Diversion and ultimately the population center that is LA.
That bit of history can't be left out. The engineering is super cool though.
Does anyone know why there's been a bit of a surge of videos/articles about this? Or am I just getting Baader-Meinhof ed?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeYvNkaLAqA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGNE-xVk8OE
My favorite part of this video is where they divert and dry up one lake, and then build two reservoirs further downstream.
I was surprised to find out it was largely uncovered, though I guess it probably makes it much cheaper to construct. I usually think of aqueducts as pipes or tunnels, like Persian qanāts. I wonder how much water is lost due to evaporation.
There's some testing to see how covering open irrigation canals with solar panels which would reduce evaporation and generate power
> Their analysis found that putting solar panels over the 4,000 miles of California’s open canals could save up to 63 billion gallons of water annually
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/solar-panel-cove...
> could save up to 63 billion gallons of water annually
To put it into perspective, 63 billion gallons is 193340 acre-feet, which is 0.5% of california's water use (a bit under 40 millions acre-feet). That's a tenth the water consumption of lawns, which is 1/15th the water consumption of agriculture.
3 replies →
Thanks! I forgot that article, but now I remember that I read or skimmed it when it made the rounds last year. It's actually where I first learned that the aqueducts were uncovered!
Am curious, how have the shade balls been working out in terms of maintenance, coating wear, leeched microplastics, containment (so they don't wind up in oceans), etc? In retrospect, did it make sense compared to the $250M or so uplift it would have taken to build a conventional roof?
2020 update: https://wateroperator.org/blog/featured-video-why-are-960000...
No way they could feasibly have built a roof over that reservoir.
Just a quick plug for Cadillac Desert. People don't realize how fragile the urban areas of Coastal California are. We should.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert
NYC aqueduct from the Catskills is wild too, especially if you like the effect on NYC pizza and bagels.
Great articles have been written on the engineering but I like this one from 1909 showing the perspective of the time:
https://www.catskillarchive.com/rrextra/dnaque.Html
Quite interesting.
This is also why every video needs a transcript: that took me 6min to read, about 1/4 of the video's running time.
The graphical aids in practical engineering videos are quite well done, especially when he creates scale models in the garage. You are missing out if you only read it, if you can afford to spend the time watching.
Nothing prevents inserting video clips — or, for that matter, interactive demos or other media — into the flow of a blog post. Youtube incentivizes its "creators" to optimize for view time, so even the most respected channels can be quite redundant in their presentation. And even when it's well edited and "organized", it doesn't necessarily prioritize what would be most useful.
Nice picture but I've never seen the water anywhere near blue like that.
That's a youtube thumbnail. I believe it's been altered, which also explains the strange brown substance that looks out of place.
Most of the video content has the correct coloring, from my experience observing the aqueduct.
I think it's edited to look like water he uses in his garage demos.
I wonder at what point the up-front costs of massive desalination would overcome the (often hidden and externalized) costs of projects like this.
> the up-front costs of massive desalination
Desalination is dominated by operating costs.
Correct it's massively energy intensive to filter the salt out the newest best ideas still use ~2 KWh/m3 of water and that's a lab system in perdue that batches the process instead of having it run continuously which is why current RO desalination systems require so much energy.
15 replies →
As long as we don't try to hide and externalize the cost of all the hyper-saline brine management that comes with desalination.
We can store it in the remains of Owens Lake ;)
I don’t think the brine pollutant issue has been meaningfully solved. You are also now pumping water inland uphill the whole way.
For usage where the water mostly returns as sewage, is treated and then returned to the ocean, you can just dilute the brine with the treated discharge and then it returns at basically the original salinity.
1 reply →
Reminds me of when I was talking to friends about the film Chinatown and I referred to it as a movie about the California water war and someone else said “dude, that’s not what that film is about”.
We were both correct.
Is it really considered the Cascades all the way down near LA? I thought the mountains down there were the Sierra Nevada? Did Grady just get that detail wrong, or am I wrong in thinking that the Cascades stops in Northern California?
A cascade is a steep, small waterfall or a series of such falls, often describing anything falling in stages.
Growing up in LA, I was fascinated as a kid watching the water flow down this aqueduct. Anytime we drove by it on the way to Magic Mountain, I'd hope that it would be a water-on day.
My dad lived in Palmdale, my mom lived in Glendale. I made that trip a LOT. It's cool when it is all lit up with the colorful lighting.
For anyone interested in a deep dive, I recommend the book Vision or villainy: origins of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles water controversy.
I remember hearing years ago that this aqueduct was going to be shut down and then it just... never was? Does anyone else recall that?
Some say the LA aqueduct saved Owens Valley from development. (I’m sure the old timers out there would have a different opinion)
> (I'm sure the old timers ...
Something along the lines of "we fought tooth and nail to save LA from development"?
I really dig the editorial viewpoint of this article. New journalism style meets fun facts about engineering.
Pretty upsetting history along with the interesting engineering.
Insane waterslide
The California aquaduct system is an engineering marvel.
Really enjoyed watching that. Good luck with water LA.
[dead]