BISHOP, Calif. — In a desert landscape dominated by sagebrush, a piece of Los Angeles’ immense water empire stands behind a chain-link fence: a hydrant-like piece of metal atop a well. The electric pump hums as it sends water gushing into a canal, forming a stream in the desert.
This well is one of 105 that L.A. owns across the Owens Valley. They were drilled decades ago, many of them when the city opened a second giant pipeline, nearly doubling its famous aqueduct to send more water south.
While many Californians know the story of how L.A. seized the valley’s river water in the early 1900s and drained Owens Lake, fewer know that the city also pulls up a significant amount of water from underground. The pumping has led to resentment among leaders of Native tribes, who say it is leaving their valley parched and harming the environment.
“We’ve seen so many impacts from groundwater pumping,” said Teri Red Owl, an Indigenous leader. “There’s a lot of areas that are dewatered, that are dried up.”
The valley spreads out at the base of the Sierra Nevada more than 200 miles north of Los Angeles. Once it had so many springs, streams and wetlands that the Paiute and Shoshone people called their homeland Payahuunadü, “the land of flowing water.” Today, tribal members say L.A.’s extensive use of water has transformed the landscape, desiccating many springs and meadows, killing native grasses and altering the ecosystem.
Red Owl, a member of the Bishop Paiute Tribe, is executive director of the Owens Valley Indian Water Commission, which focuses on helping tribes regain some of the lands and water they lost more than a century ago, first to white farmers and ranchers, then to Los Angeles.
“We’re just a water colony,” Red Owl said as she drove from one well to another, passing dry, brown expanses with signs marking the land as L.A. city property.
The L.A. Department of Water and Power owns much of the land in the Owens Valley, where the city gets about one-third of its water from mountain streams and the Owens River.
Red Owl said L.A.’s pumping has taken a vital “life force” from the tribes’ homeland, and she wants to see the city extract less. She and other tribal members, who call themselves Nüümü, are part of a movement focused on making that happen.
The issue dates to 1936, when the federal government, in an exchange of land with Los Angeles, obtained lands to establish three small reservations.
The tribes got no water rights as part of the deal, but they did get L.A.’s commitment to provide them a certain amount of water through canals.
In a letter this summer, a group of 30 professors and researchers urged L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and other city leaders to reopen negotiations with the three tribes.
“It is time to listen to what the Tribes are asking for,” they wrote, “the land and water rights needed to make their reservations viable sovereign homelands.”
The Bishop Paiute, Big Pine Paiute and Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone tribes, like many other tribes across California and the West, still don’t have legal recognition of their water rights. They want to obtain not only water but also additional lands to add to their tiny reservations.
“My goal is to have a healthy homeland,” Red Owl said. “It takes water.”
But where the tribes see a place deprived of water, Los Angeles officials say they see a relatively healthy landscape where they are successfully working to remedy past environmental harm. Adam Perez, DWP’s director of water operations, said groundwater is “being managed in a sustainable way.”
Los Angeles draws less water from the valley now than it did in the 1970s, when the city built the second aqueduct. The heavy pumping then prompted Inyo County to sue over environmental damage, and led to a 1991 agreement between the county and DWP that set goals to prevent further ecological harm.
Perez said DWP works closely with county officials to protect the environment. For example, each summer, DWP has a team of biologists survey vegetation in areas with wells. He said if they find grasses and shrubs are thinning, sometimes they shut down nearby wells.
DWP’s managers focus on not drawing too heavily from wells to maintain healthy conditions for plants and the environment, Perez said.
“The last thing we want to do is basically pull the water down and impact the vegetation,” he said.
DWP said 19 of its 105 wells in the valley are now operating. This year, it plans to pump between 62,000 and 83,000 acre-feet of groundwater, equivalent to roughly 12% to 16% of the annual water consumption in Los Angeles. But city officials stress that this water no longer flows to Los Angeles. Instead, it’s all used in the Owens Valley, to provide tap water for towns, nourish habitat restoration areas, and spread on the dry bed of Owens Lake to control dust.
Monitoring wells show stable conditions in recent years, Perez said. DWP’s efforts to use groundwater in a responsible way, he said, represent a “great success story.”
Tribal leaders, however, say the city’s wells are pumping far too much and continue to draw down the water table beneath areas that once had thriving wetlands and meadows.
South of the town of Big Pine, Noah Williams, Red Owl’s son and a member of the Bishop Paiute Tribe, walked through dry brush to a low-lying stretch of desert.
More than half a century ago, he said, a spring-fed pool shimmered in this spot. Historically, it was an oasis where the Nüümü had lived.
“There are some of the water marks,” he said, pointing to a line of whitish minerals coating the dark volcanic boulders, where water had once lapped. Where he stood, the water would have reached his chest.
The pond dried up in the 1970s after two wells were drilled as part of an expansion of the nearby fish hatchery at Fish Springs, and as pumping lowered the water table, Williams said. Today, water continues gushing from wells into concrete ponds filled with trout, and then flows through a channel toward the L.A. Aqueduct.
Nonnative weeds have flourished in the bottom of the empty pond, which remains dry most of the time.
“This is a man-made drought,” he said.
Years ago, Williams said, he would come here with his late father Harry Williams, who would point out rings of rocks marking old village sites. The elder Williams also spent years finding and mapping ancient canals and ditches that their ancestors used to farm centuries ago.
Williams said those irrigation methods worked in concert with nature, the exact opposite of how Los Angeles has drilled wells to extract water that Mother Earth accumulated over centuries in her “womb.” In addition to its wells equipped with pumps, the city also has pierced the land with metal pipes to tap confined pockets of groundwater near the Owens River, creating artesian wells that constantly gush water and flow toward the aqueduct.
“It’s one thing to take the surface water,” he said, “but it’s another thing to really take the groundwater from the land. That’s when you’re truly stealing the life from the land, when you’re extracting massive amounts of water.”
The loss of this 5-acre pond, as well as other springs, has taken away wetlands that once teemed with birds and other animals, Williams said, and where Native people once hunted and gathered plants for food and medicine.
“I would like to see the wildlife being able to use this,” he said. “I want to see the water flowing again.”
Under its agreement with Inyo County, DWP has dozens of ongoing environmental restoration projects, in some cases pumping groundwater to recreate wetlands — an approach that Williams and others say is ill-conceived.
Environmental advocates also criticize these efforts, saying they aren’t achieving nearly enough.
Lynn Boulton, the Sierra Club’s local conservation chair, walked along a dirt road to what was once a marshy alkali meadow. The grasses died decades ago when their roots could no longer reach the groundwater, she said, and were replaced by invasive pepperweed, which is hard to eradicate.
“We’ve lost riparian habitat here,” she said, and despite years of efforts by DWP to reverse the damage, “we’re still living with the problem.”
If Los Angeles reduced its pumping, the valley’s aquifer levels would rise and meadows could recover, Boulton said.
“I want the biodiversity back,” she said.
Perez responded that Los Angeles is already pumping far less than was contemplated in its agreement with Inyo County, and has been for years.
As for negotiations over water rights, Perez said the city is waiting for more specifics from the tribes.
The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs now has a team assessing the tribes’ water rights. In a letter to the bureau last month, L.A. Board of Water and Power Commission President Richard Katz requested information about what the tribes are seeking, including “potential avenues for addressing these claims.”
On the reservations, meanwhile, people continue to grow food in their gardens with the limited water they have.
Thomas River Watterson grows tomatoes, corn and squash at a vegetable garden that is part of the Bishop Paiute Tribe’s food program. He also tends to a plant called taboose that people traditionally harvested.
With more water, he said, the tribe could farm more and restore plants and animals that belong in the valley’s wetlands.
But as the situation stands, he said, Los Angeles continues taking too much, and if that doesn’t change, “you’ll see everything start drying up.”
“I feel like they’re taking everything they can,” he said, “every single drop.”
The post The little-known groundwater Los Angeles pumps in the Owens Valley, and the tribes who want it back appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
