Long-Distance Allegiance : Owens Valley Residents Toil to Reopen L.A.’s Water Spigot

It’s not that Jim Snead bad-mouths Los Angeles. Still, it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t care much for the big city 180 miles south of here, at least not as a place to live. He tried it, didn’t like it and got out.

“Couldn’t stand the freeways,” he recalled.

That was 25 years ago.

But like plenty of people in the Owens Valley, Snead is an example of how you can take the boy out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the boy. Every payday, Snead and about 250 other Owens Valley residents feel a special allegiance to Los Angeles. What the metropolis gets in return, under normal circumstances, is water.

Snead is maintenance superintendent for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and these are not normal circumstances--not for Los Angeles, not for Snead, not for Olancha. This speck of a town in the sagebrush nothingness along U.S. 395 is where nature punished civilization last week with a freak summer storm that moved millions of tons of the Sierra Nevada down the eastern slope, burying the artificial river that made Los Angeles what it is today.

Ever since the flash flood hit the night of Aug. 8, it’s been up to Snead and his cohorts to dig the Los Angeles Aqueduct out from under 15 feet of mud, granite boulders and the occasional splintered pine. A crew of 110 workers have been toiling round-the-clock to unplug the 76-year-old, 338-mile-long aqueduct that is supposed to supply Los Angeles with 75% of its water.

At the moment, Los Angeles has been sating its 750-million-gallon-a-day thirst mostly with water stored in reservoirs south of the aqueduct. The DWP also temporarily increased its intake from the Metropolitan Water District from 250 million gallons a day to 350 million gallons. The MWD gets its water from the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta state water project.

By Monday or Tuesday, Snead expects to have the aqueduct flowing again. To laymen who witness the mile of muck, the schedule seems optimistic. But Snead is confident.

“Our whole purpose being here,” he said, “is a day like this.”

“You don’t wake up saying, ‘God, I hope the aqueduct gets filled up with mud,’ ” said Mike Daughtry, a 27-year-old DWP worker from Independence. “But I like to see how hard I can hit it for how long.”

Daughtry had just finished a few hours of overtime on what was to be a 12-hour, all-night shift. Everyone has worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week since the morning after the flash flood hit, Snead said.

Normally, Olancha Creek comes out of the Sierra as a steady little brook and is channeled across the aqueduct on a 20-foot-wide concrete bridge called “an overhead.” This time, Olancha Creek was several hundred yards wide.

The night of Aug. 8, there wasn’t much to do but assess the situation and get organized, Snead said. The first call of water spilling over U.S. 395 came at 7 p.m. Within an hour, a DWP foreman was on the scene, and calls were placed to Los Angeles for more equipment and workers.

“The aqueduct just disappeared,” Snead said. “We knew it was down there because we left it there a couple of days before.”

At some places, the 15-foot deep channel held 30 feet of rocks and mud. The concrete-lined channel was not damaged, but “fossilized,” he said.

It was the worst crisis on the aqueduct since a similar flash flood 20 years ago. A downpour Aug. 10 complicated matters, loosening concrete panels south of the mud slide and threatening the channel’s structural integrity. If the aqueduct had been filled with water, the pressure would have prevented the rain from seeping between the earth and the concrete walls of the channel.

The first morning, a command post was formed in an Inyo County road maintenance yard where the Olancha Volunteer Fire Department is based. A group of DWP heavy equipment operators came up from Los Angeles to work, their motor homes forming an impromptu suburb. They dubbed it “Sam’s Town” in honor of Sam Bishelli, the truck and heavy equipment dispatcher.

By reputation, Owens Valley residents are said to resent the way Los Angeles city slickers took their water rights and built the aqueduct way back when. If folks here see cosmic justice in the way Olancha Creek stopped the mighty Los Angeles Aqueduct, Snead doesn’t buy it.

“That’s a lot of hype,” he said. “The response of the whole Valley--people offering to help--has been tremendous. We’re all citizens of the county. We all pull together.”