©Jennifer Little, Owens Dry Lake viewed from above the Dolomite Marble Quarry, Owens Valley, CA. Los Angeles’s dust mitigation project at Owens Lake has transformed the dry lakebed into an industrialized grid of berm roads, shallow flood zones, deep food ponds, gravel zones, and tillage mitigation zones. All of this infrastructure is supported by hundreds of miles of buried irrigation pipes and drip tubing. The gravel used in the gravel mitigation zone at the upper right of this photo is sourced from the Dolomite Marble Quarry in the foreground.

©Jennifer Little, LADWP Shallow Flood Irrigation Zone, Owens Lake, CA. Shallow flood irrigation zones at Owens Lake recirculate water through a series of very shallow ponds to keep the lake playa moist and prevent blowing dust. LADWP has installed 39.5 square miles of shallow flood irrigation at Owens Lake to date. It costs $10 million per square mile to construct this type of water-based dust mitigation.

©Jennifer Little, LADWP Irrigation Pipe, Owens Lake, CA. Los Angeles has built one of the largest environmental mitigation projects in the world at Owens Lake, with ongoing annual maintenance costs around $40 million. A permanent staff of 60 to 65 LADWP employees is required to maintain the very extensive irrigation and dust mitigation infrastructure at Owens Lake. Hundreds more contract employees are brought in for each construction phase.

©Jennifer Little, LADWP Shallow Flood Irrigation Bubbler, Owens Lake, CA. Half of the water that feeds the Los Angeles Aqueduct is now used for environmental mitigation projects in the Owens Valley and the Eastern Sierra. LADWP is replacing most of that water supply with increasingly limited water from the California Aqueduct. This water comes primarily from the Sacramento and the Feather Rivers in Northern California. 2015’s record breaking drought is a reminder that water resources in the Western United States are both extremely limited and interconnected, especially as global warming results in a drier climate.

©Jennifer Little, LADWP Gravel Mitigation Zone, Owens Lake, CA. The LADWP has covered a little over 2 square miles of the Owens Lake playa with gravel for dust control. Gravel has been used in the smallest area because it is the most expensive mitigation technique with a construction cost of $25 million per square mile. Gravel cover is now being expanded in construction Phases 7a, 9, and 10 to save water.

©Jennifer Little, LADWP Gravel Mitigation Construction, Owens Lake, CA. Construction contractors from Barnard Construction lay geo-textile fabric down on the Owens Lake playa before covering it with exactly 2 inches of gravel. The gravel has to be redone periodically because it, too, fills with dust.

©Jennifer Little, Salt Formation in Dry LADWP Shallow Flood Irrigation Zone, Owens Lake, CA. The LADWP implements a summer dry down for their irrigation at Owens Lake between July 1 and September 30. The worst winds and dust storms occur during the rest of the year—especially between March and May—which is considered the primary dust control season. During the summer dry down, shallow flood ponds are allowed to evaporate, leaving behind bizarre, man-made salt formations.

©Jennifer Little, Experimental Tillage Mitigation Zone, Owens Lake, CA. After 5 years of severe drought, Los Angeles reached an emergency settlement with Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District to implement a new dust control technique at Owens Lake in 2015. This new “tillage” mitigation process involves plowing deep furrows into clay soils that will capture blowing dust. LADWP is currently converting shallow flood zones at Owens Lake over to tillage mitigation in order to save water.

©Jennifer Little, Hybrid Flood Mitigation Zone, Owens Lake, CA. Over the last year, LADWP constructed a number of hybrid dust mitigation zones combining plowed tillage furrows with shallow flooding. These combined mitigation techniques are more effective and use less water.

©Jennifer Little, Original Intake for the Los Angeles Aqueduct, Owens Valley, CA. This original intake for the Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed in 1913. It initially diverted the full course of the Owens River into the aqueduct canal, which runs 233 miles from here to Los Angeles. Today, Los Angeles supplies about 1/3 of its drinking water from the LA Aqueduct system.

©Jennifer Little, Los Angeles Aqueduct Canal, Owens Valley, CA. This upper section of the original Los Angeles Aqueduct is a 40-ft wide open air, unlined ditch running through the Owens Valley south of the town of Big Pine and north of Lone Pine. It redirects most of the Owens River to Los Angeles.

©Jennifer Little, Symmes Creek Subsidence, Owens Valley, CA. This valley along the upper section of the LA Aqueduct was a wetland meadow before Los Angeles began pumping the groundwater in the early 1970s. The subsidence shown here is a direct result of the Los Angeles’s excessive groundwater pumping. LADWP tried to stabilize the subsidence by paving over the creek bed, but it eventually collapsed anyway. Active groundwater pumps surround this subsidence immediately to the north and south.

©Jennifer Little, Dust Storm Along the Owens River, Owens Valley, CA. All of Owens Valley is more prone to dust storms and poor air quality due to Los Angeles’s ground water pumping and other water diversions from the region. The Owens Lake Dust Mitigation Project has succeeded in reducing dust storms from the dry lake’s playa by 90% over the last 15 years, but increased ground water pumping has contributed to worsening dust storms in other parts of Owens Valley during the same time period.

©Jennifer Owens, Los Angeles Aqueduct Canal Adjacent to Owens Lake, Ovens Valley, CA. The Los Angeles Aqueduct enters an open-air concrete canal as it skirts around the edges of Owens Dry Lake. Along this stretch, it collects all the water from mountain streams that would otherwise feed Sierra snowmelt into Owens Lake.

©Jennifer Little, The Los Angeles Aqueduct Cascades, Los Angeles, CA. The Los Angeles Aqueduct pipeline terminates at the northern corner of the San Fernando Valley where it fills the Van Norman Reservoir. This site, named the Cascades, is the location where 40,000 people gathered on Nov. 5, 1913, to watch the Aqueduct water reach Los Angeles for the first time. Addressing the crowd, William Mulholland, the City’s chief water engineer, uttered the now infamous phrase, “There it is — take it,” as Owens Valley water flowed into Los Angeles for the first time.