Through the desert, a precious liquid cargo
The Julian Hinds Pumping Plant is one of the hydraulic hearts of California’s vast water supply system, built early in the last century to push water from where it is to where it isn’t, no matter how many hundreds of miles of desert, mountains and valleys are in the way.
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The volume of water propelled uphill on one recent day at Hinds weighed the equivalent of more than four World Trade Center towers and required six, 12,500-horsepower motors driven by electricity, much of it from Hoover and Parker dams on the Colorado River.
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Water from the Colorado River flows through a sand trap, center, before arriving at the Julian Hinds Pumping Plant, the final leg of its journey from the Arizona border to a reservoir in Riverside County.
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Alan Cross, a pump plant specialist with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, is dwarfed by the massive pumps at the Julian Hinds plant, 150 miles east of Los Angeles. Each of the plant’s nine pumps is several stories tall and so finely calibrated that one of the original engineers boasted: You can stand a nickel on end when I get done. Cross, balancing a nickel on a shiny green pump housing, said thats true today.”
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Unlike the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which relies on nothing more than gravity to send supplies from the Owens Valley to L.A., the long straw that the Metropolitan Water District dipped into the Colorado River needs a boost.
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Alan Cross, a pump plant specialist, stands next to a massive water outlet at the Hinds plant. The 242-mile-long Colorado River Aqueduct is a monument to 20th century grandiosity, when Southern California’s power brokers thought nothing of rearranging nature to serve their urban ambitions.
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The Colorado River Aqueduct snakes through the desert on its way to the Hinds plant.
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