I love public television. Still, it's not known as an outlet for thrill seekers. It seldom provides its viewers with an adrenaline rush. Nonetheless, PBS does stage memorable television events, and one of them was the documentary, Cadillac Desert, accompanied by Marc Reisner's best-selling book of the same name.
Reisner chronicles in mostly-riveting, though sometimes mind-numbing, detail the great Westward Migration in America and its dependence on a dwindling, non-renewable water supply. The intrigue and politics of water, says Reisner, have been the driving force in shaping the American West, and in the end there simply will not be enough of it. When it runs out, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed inevitably by a great Eastward Migration.
Readers of Cadillac Desert will remember one of the most notorious events in California History, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, which occurred eighty years ago this week. Early Twentiety-Century celebrity, Los Angeles water engineer William Mulholland (as in Mulholland Drive) had just watched a proposal to strip yet more water from the Owens Valley go sour. He desperately needed to find a way to satisfy LA's growing water addiction, and in the end he decided to expand the size of an already-large dam in the nearby San Francisquito Canyon. This proved to be a lousy idea.
Continue reading 'Dam! California celebrates a notorious anniversary.' >
