The American aqueduct scandal - 18 August 1995

In the long ago, when I was first appointed as chief American correspondent for a British paper, my editor a small spiky haired Lancashire man with a mocking eye behind beer-bottled glasses, he tapped the stem of his pipe against his teeth and he pondered the first problem of my appointment.

Well I had lived in New York for nine years, I had children going to school there, but chief correspondents lived in Washington didn't they? "Yes, well," said little Mr Wardsworth "I'd rather you stayed in New York." This was a great relief to me, but why should he prefer me to stay in what my closest American journalist friend called a third rate Babylon instead of strutting my stuff in what all the radio and television commentators called the nation's capital? Mr Wardsworth was quick to give his reason: "The danger of Washington," he said, "is you might get to write like the New York Times." Now I leap in to say it once that my editor had the greatest admiration for the New York Times, looked on it as easily the best American paper, but he refined what he had in mind by adding: "You could get to write the Washington jargon for Washington readers inside writing for the insiders, New York," he said "is the news centre of the country." I nodded enthusiastically and was ready to pack my bags. "Mind you," he said waving his pipe, "you're not there to report New York, the whole country is your beat." That had been my inclination from the start and I was off and running. I took him literally and thereafter every spring or summer for many years I set off to drive across and around the country by various wayward routes not on assignment to a particular story but just to report on the life of the different regions of this continental country about, which in those days almost nothing appeared in the British press.

And it was from the experience of those early days right after the Second War and on through the Eisenhower '50s that I discovered the necessity, as well as I admit the fun, of reporting the country sometimes from the other end so to speak, from the West Coast instead of the East. It's true today that television more than anything has blanketed the entire nation with at least, half, two thirds of the same programmes. Here in San Francisco, I have a choice of 54, only a few of which are special or indigenous to San Francisco as you might well suppose. There are two or three Chinese channels, a Russian one, a new one is entirely for and in Vietnamese and there are, as there everywhere through the deep South, the Southwest, all California, many thriving Spanish speaking stations.

Well I was saying, or implying, that practically whether you live in the United States on a great river up the highest mountain, in the desert, on the prairie, in any one of 100 cities you can see everyday the same soaps, the same news, the same weather channel, the same commentaries and this new all embracing medium would seem to stifle or at least weaken the strong differences that used to exist between the life of one region and another.

However, every section of the country has some special local concern and there have been in California, over the long run from its earliest day's, one constant preoccupation: water. Indeed, this has always been true everywhere in the West, before you could build a cabin, start a farm, plant a crop, the first thing you had to secure was water rights and there never would have been a sprawling metropolis like Los Angeles if a crop of pioneer businessmen hadn't engaged in mighty battles with the farmers inland over the coast range of mountains and into the valleys. The men who were the first recipients of the melting snows from the High Sierra.

In the first decades of this century, Los Angeles posted its signs, Los Angeles City Limits outrageously far from the city centre in order to attract inhabitants, but then they had to bring in water to keep them there, so they built aqueducts over the coast range up into the Owens Valley, which was at the time, lush and fertile farmland. The Los Angeles aqueduct drained the water away from these farms and piped it off to the service of the first sprawling great city of the coast, the valley farmers thereupon dynamited the aqueducts, they had dreary battles with the police and the state legislature and in the end they lost as they were bound to do, to the impoverishment of some of them and the embitterment of all of them.

After America got into the Second War, after almost all Americans of Japanese birth or descent were rounded up and concentrated far inland in two or three states, I went up into the Owens Valley to one such camp, politely known as a 'relocation centre', and there in this once gorgeous farmland were all these pottering internees their faces wrapped around with handkerchiefs, bending as they walked into a whistling great cloud of dust. The entire huge valley was now windblown semi desert. On the way back to the coast from that memorable trip I stopped at a place named Lone Pine, the name a shack or two and a petrol station constituted then the whole town. I stopped for gasoline, for petrol. In the mens' room over the lavatory, there was a square piece of wood nailed to the wall and on it was inscribed – it had been done it appeared by a red hot poker, – very crude lettering but the message, the emotion, was fine and bitter, it said: "Please don't flush the toilet, Los Angeles needs the water." The memory never faded from that built generation of farmers or from their sons.

Today, the great aqueduct scandal is an item in the history books, interesting and long ago. Now at the turn of the century, the Congress passed a law promising cheap water to all farmers in the United States who lived on no more than 160 acres, a quarter of a section. That was what in the second half of the 19th century, what the government promised any immigrant onto the prairie, gave him free if he could produce a viable crop within five years.

The federal law of 1902 was intended to encourage and multiply family farms, but since then, farm technology and the growth of great farm corporations have put paid to the family farm and the old subsidies now go to the huge new corporate farmers whether they live on a farm or a 1000 miles away, so how about water in the West today? Well for once the West can mean the Western world, and the plight it might find itself in when in about 20, 30 years the expanding deserts of the world will be populated by more millions than there are today, and most of them will suffer from a chronic shortage of water.

There was this week a meeting in Stockholm to face the strong likelihood of a world in which the most populous regions will have the poorest storage systems, and the most rudimentary delivery system in many lands: the pot balancing on a woman's head. If this seems like simply the latest outcry of the doom and gloomers, there was a further sobering report from the World Bank, which talks about a huge problem, which they see not simply as a problem of getting water efficiently to the people who need it most, but a problem of halting its pollution and greatly expanding conservation measures everywhere. It's a boggling thought so awful that most of us can't take it in or won't want too.

But I must say that if the rousing ideological performance of Mr Newt Gingrich and his Republican House is anything to go on, the present American trend is to abolish most of the controls that in the past 30 years or so have managed to clean up polluted rivers, make the great lakes fishable again and guarantee more people the use of a pure water supply. The wounding needle in the existing legislation is that it punishes manufacturers for polluting neighbouring waters and costs them great sums of money to cleanse their product and decontaminate the land and the water they work in.

The fact that 70 per cent of all Americans think there should be more and stricter protection of the environment then less is evidently not reflected in the determination of the Republican majority to privatise everything in sight, including water, or, should I say if that famous contract is anything to go on, to emasculate as much as possible the governing power of the federal government. There's a move 3000 miles away in Washington D.C. for a collective of water districts to buy from the government, the 50-year-old federally run central valley project of California, a great system of reversing the flow of two great rivers, of controlling the Sierra waters with 20 dams, hundreds of miles of aqueducts. And there are dedicated, what shall we say, privateers, who believe this huge public resource could be better run by a board of private persons than by the federals. We shall see!

I was in on the christening of the Central Valley project in the late summer of 1951, the opening over the pumping stations at a place in the valley called Tracy I think, it was to happen right at the very end of the Japanese peace treaty conference, which I'd been covering. I cabled my editor to ask if I couldn't stay in California for the opening of this highly and rightly publicised project. The reversing of the flow of the Sacramento on The San Joaquin River and the harnessing and distributing of their power for the farmers and the people of this vast 300 mile long valley.

What I didn't know was that at that moment, the Queen Mary was practically listing into New York from the combined weight of all the sportswriters sailing in to cover what they called 'the fight of the century', Sugar Ray Robinson versus his British challenger Randolph Turpin. I knew nothing of this, but when I sent a begging cable to that same shrewd little spiky haired editor describing the Central Valley water project as the greatest hydroelectric undertaking in history, he promptly replied in a brief cable: "Go New York soonest, blood thicker than water in this country".

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