Water To The Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct And The Rise Of Los Angeles, Standiford - B

                                             This is the momentous story of how a city with a laughingly minute amount of available water in a vast desert became a megalopolis of millions of people. Perhaps Los Angeles could have become a city of 50-100,000 if left to its own devices. Fortunately for LA and its environs, an itinerant Irish-born laborer was hired as a well-driller in the late 1870's. William Mulholland would go on to run LA's water systems until deep into the 20th century. He had the vision and ambition to imagine the 233-mile-long aqueduct running from the Owens River in the north of the state down (literally downhill all the way, thanks to gravity) to the San Fernando Valley. He traveled by buckboard throughout the region to research the possibilities and supervised the construction of the aqueduct that created southern California. (A later project brought Colorado River water to Long Beach, Orange County and San Diego).This book delves into the specifics of the financing, the nuances of the nascent labor movement and the details of the incredibly complicated construction. It took six years, 46 deaths and millions of dollars to complete the project in November, 1913. The result was an explosion in  agricultural productivity, population and economic growth.
                                            Over a decade later, the collapse of the St. Francis dam led to hundreds of deaths and haunted Mulholland to his grave. History has suggested that he could not be faulted for the site selection based on the science of his era. During the inquest, he said he "envied the dead". Seven months later and after 50 years on the job, the 'Chief' retired from public service.  Long after his 1935 death, in 1990, he was listed by Life magazine as one of the 100 most influential men of the century.
                                            The author closes with the backstory to 'Chinatown', in which Hollis Mulwray was based on Mulholland, albeit three decades later. He surmises that great scripts require great stories and that the quest for water, the corruption amongst the landowners and the success in finding it is so quintessentially Californian that 'Chinatown' has been accepted as history.