Located in the shadow of towering Sierra Nevada mountains, hundreds of miles away from any big city, the Owens Valley should be one of the least polluted places in America.
But when the winds begin to gust across the Valley’s 110-square-mile dry lake bed, enormous,clouds of choking dust are sent billowing into the air, blanketing the valley in haze and sending particulate pollution levels soaring to over 100 times the federal standard.
The dust storms are not only an annoyance to residents of Sierra foothill communities like Independence, Bishop, and Lone Pine, they threaten the health of children, the elderly and people with heart and lung problems.
Owens Valley residents blame Los Angeles for turning their isolated corner of California into the state’s dust bowl. Nearly a century ago, in one of the most controversial chapters in state history, L.A. acquired water rights in the Valley, and then built an aqueduct to send the water flowing to the thirsty and growing city 230 miles to the south. The diversion of water decades ago dried out the Owens Lake, creating today’s spawning grounds of dust storms.
Now Los Angeles is trying to clean up the mess it created and repay a historical debt to the Valley.
In an unprecedented, multi-million dollar engineering project, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is using millions of gallons of valuable drinking water bound for L.A. and pouring it into the dry lake bed to create giant mud flats dozens of square miles in size. It’s hoped the project will finally end the Owens Valley’s dust storm nightmares. As one Water and Power official says, “mud don’t blow.”