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The California Aqueduct delivers water from the western Sierras through the Central Valley and to Los Angeles. This is likely what NorCal refers to when they say SoCal is 'stealing our water'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct

Would be interesting to see the relative amounts of use by LA and by agriculture in the Central Valley though.

Owens valley is basically dried up from the water that LA takes. It's interesting as you drive in the towns in the Valley and you see all the LA Department of Water and Power offices over 200 miles from Los Angeles. The courts had to force the LA DWP to quit taking too much water from the streams that feed Mono Lake as it was in danger of drying out.

LA also gets water from the state water project which does come from northern california: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/Ca...

they are saying that LA takes water from sources which would otherwise drain into the sacramento and san joaquin river delta. The video from this post mentions the California State Water Project which takes water from the Feather River (Oroville Dam) and distributes it along the Western edge of the central valley South to Bakersfield where it is then pumped over the mountains both towards Los Angeles and further East to San Bernardino and Riverside. It provides way more water to SoCal than the two Los Angeles-specific aqueducts from the Owens Valley on the Eastern side of the Sierras.

Old men yelling at the sky don't often seek rationality or nuance in their cries.

Also, water towers. As long as the power isn't out long enough to deplete the tower.

Do you lose water in the whole building, or just those apartments above the water-line?

LA definitely treats the water. Both the surface water before consumption (I'd be surprised if any city doesn't do this) and the wastewater, for reclamation for nonportable use like irrigation, and for recycling back into the general clean water supply.

The aqueduct water is specifically purified by the Los Angeles Aqueduct Filtration Plant. That plant is gravity fed, but it doesn't operate without power.

LA just has the advantage of having mountains in the city, so it's cheaper building more elevated water storage so the capacity lasts longer during power interruptions (which are also not as common or extended as they are in the east). They will still eventually run out if they're not replenished by powered pumps.

Where did you get that idea about NYC water being untreated? NYC treats its water. Chlorine is added if and when needed. Testing stations exist to evaluate water quality all around the boroughs, etc.

You can't have a city of millions of people and have the water be potable from the tap without testing and treatment

I know NYC doesn't treat their water at all…

EDIT: I'm a dork an grabbed the wrong URL. Changed URL to a PDF for lack of better.

A major metro doesn’t treat its tap water? Where on earth did you get that crazy idea?

<old URL deleted>

https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/water/drinking-...

I'll save some digging: "Even without filtration, the water is carefully treated to reduce the risk of harmful microorganisms."

Fair. Maybe I'm too much if the weeds of this because all I can think of is how much of a fight it was to pass ST2 and ST3 and how we haven't even started on the Ballard line despite voting for it in 2016 (10 years ago!) and how it might be delayed forever.

No, it's not an insane engineering achievement. It's just a normal one, because nobody else has floating bridges, nobody else needed it. It's also years late and costs 10x more than it should.

It's also the wrong stupid technology. The trains are constrained on space because of the low-floor bullshit. It's the longest light rail in the country, it's too fucking long and slow. Even if we fully built out ST3 it can't handle more than ~20% of commuters. It can't be expanded with express tracks because it's built deep underground, so the commute is so much slower than the equivalent in other countries and will NEVER compete with the automobile except during peak rush hour. The northern stations are next to the freeway so over half the land that could be transit-oriented development can't be, and then what's left is devoted to parking anyway. Complete, total waste of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, built and planned by people who don't and won't ever use transit.

That 10x cost directly makes it so we can't build out our system properly and we keep building out car infrastructure because people would rather have a car and save 2 hours a day commuting.

The commute is slow because the light rail is slow. It's the wrong technology for commuter rail and there are too many stops. (I'm assuming you live north).

(more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457884)

Evidently tax cuts for the wealthy are more important than infrastructure.

Can't do highspeed rail because it's too impractical and expensive, while we're spending a west coast highspeed rail network worth of money on the least popular war in US history.

If you watch the OP, you'll see that the construction of this aqueduct caused billions of dollars worth of environmental devastation. Rail all you want against regulations, but when an argument boils down to "I wish we didn't have to internalize all these costs and could just push them off on someone else", I'm not especially sympathetic.

Certainly that’s part of it, but also just NIMBYism. Los Angeles were able to defeat the Owen’s Valley farmers back then, I don’t think they would be now.

Progress is made on it daily? Great. How soon can I ride it?

Anecdotally, my friend's grandma was an almond farmer. As they drove past a river in the Central Valley, she exclaimed "Why is there water in that river?! Those could be watering my almond trees!"

So why hasn’t that been done? Have some representatives and senators set limits on almond exports. Surely they wouldn’t be voted out in the next election given how farmers are outnumbered.

Almonds are climate-appropriate product and valuable. Alfalfa can cheaply be grown off rainwater in the Midwest and it alone frees up sufficient water.

to put this to numbers... the exports are just about 0.5% of california's GDP. so yeah pretty much a rounding error.

> could save up to 63 billion gallons of water annually

To put it into perspective, 63 billion gallons is 193340 acre-feet, which is 0.5% of california's water use (a bit under 40 millions acre-feet). That's a tenth the water consumption of lawns, which is 1/15th the water consumption of agriculture.

Thanks! I forgot that article, but now I remember that I read or skimmed it when it made the rounds last year. It's actually where I first learned that the aqueducts were uncovered!

Correct it's massively energy intensive to filter the salt out the newest best ideas still use ~2 KWh/m3 of water and that's a lab system in perdue that batches the process instead of having it run continuously which is why current RO desalination systems require so much energy.

We can store it in the remains of Owens Lake ;)

For usage where the water mostly returns as sewage, is treated and then returned to the ocean, you can just dilute the brine with the treated discharge and then it returns at basically the original salinity.

That bit of history can't be left out. The engineering is super cool though.