Sixty years ago, California Gov. Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown built the biggest waterworks the world had ever seen. The State Water Project transformed California, moving billions of gallons of water from the wet north to the dry south using dozens of dams, pumping stations and a 400-mile-long man-made river. It serves 25 million people and irrigates hundreds of thousands of acres of cropland. But spectacular as it was, the project was flawed.