It’s Just a Drop in the Bucket, but Cyclists Are Riding Home a Point
Seventy-two bicyclists filled test tubes with water from reflecting pools at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s downtown headquarters Monday morning, then pedaled off to dump it back into Mono Lake.
The 350-mile bike trek is the 14,000-member Mono Lake Committee’s ninth annual attempt to call attention to complaints that the lake and its wildlife are threatened by the DWP’s diversion of water from tributary streams.
The bikers figure to reach the Sierra lake on Saturday. The DWP’s Treva Miller said that, in a normal year, the utility diverts about 100,000 acre-feet of water from four streams that flow into the lake, leaving three other streams to spill about 70,000 acre-feet into Mono. In a drought year like this, she said, the diversion is “cut back severely.” But Martha Davis of the committee said an additional 70,000 acre-feet of water a year are needed to keep Mono Lake up to the proper level.
She conceded that 72 test tubes aren’t going to do it.
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