California’s effort to secure water supplies is a struggle older than the state itself.
It played out during the Gold Rush, and it defines modern San Francisco and Los Angeles. It has created divisions between north and south as well as east and west.
Mono Lake is just one of the sources Los Angeles uses to meet its water demands. But those who oversee it want a better plan to keep more of the water in the basin.
As trickling snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada slowly raises Mono Lake — famed for its bird life and outlandish shoreline mineral spires — advocates are pressuring state water officials to halt diversions from the lake’s tributaries to Los Angeles, which has used this clean mountain water source for decades.
On Monday, California water officials slogged through deep snow 7,000 feet above sea level, west of Lake Tahoe, to affirm what everyone already knew: A series of Pacific storms has generated record-level amounts of precipitation, filling reservoirs, inundating low-lying towns and fields and threatening more disastrous flooding as the Sierra snowpack melts.
Its negative aspects aside, the immense amount of rain and snow is welcome relief from drought that has plagued the state for the past three years.
With its haunting rock spires and salt-crusted shores, Mono Lake is a Hollywood vision of the apocalypse. To the city of Los Angeles, however, this Eastern Sierra basin represents the very source of L.A.’s prosperity — the right to free water.
For decades, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has relied on long-standing water rights to divert from the streams that feed this ancient lake as part of the city’s far-flung water empire. But in the face of global warming, drought and lawsuits from environmentalists, the DWP is now facing the previously unthinkable prospect of ending its diversions there.
California authorities face renewed pressure to preserve the valuable salty waters of the Mono Lake — as despite recent rainfall, a historic drought and demands from the Los Angeles area have depleted it.
In a workshop Wednesday, the state Water Resources Control Board discussed Mono Lake’s current conditions amid the impacts of severe drought and ongoing diversions.
Against the backdrop of a severe drought linked with global warming, conservation advocates and Native Americans in California are calling for a temporary emergency stop to all surface water diversions from Mono Lake, contending that continuing to drain the watershed, along with the long-term drought, threaten critical ecosystems, as well as the Kootzaduka’a tribe’s cultural connection with the lake.
As California enters what is expected to be a fourth year of drought, the State Water Resources Control Board is reviewing a request from environmentalists to suspend Los Angeles Department of Water and Power diversions from Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. In its request, the nonprofit Mono Lake Committee argues that the combination of drought and diversions from streams that feed the lake are exposing the lake bottom near islands that host one of the world’s largest nesting gull populations.
When Rose Nelson camped along lower Rush Creek in the summer of 2017, the water was flowing as high and fast as anyone could remember. The rumble and roar of the creek, she said, was the joyful sound of nature healing. “It was the first high runoff after a long drought,” said Nelson, now the education director for the Mono Lake Committee, a nonprofit based in Lee Vining, California.
The few who live along the shores of Mono Lake are accustomed to the peculiarities of this high desert basin.
Famously strange limestone spires known as tufa towers rise from the water. The lake contains so much salt that it’s barren of fish. In the arid sands beyond, sagebrush thrives, and that’s about it.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
