“But, it is not just the Los Angeles Aqueduct that Mulholland bequeathed to us in this city. He initiated the campaign to build the Hoover Dam and played a key role in ensuring that the Federal Government built it. To do so, as the superintendent of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP), he was an initiator of the founding of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which today distributes water to all the cities of the region from Ventura to San Diego. For more than 40 years Mulholland, as the superintendent of the (DWP), built the entire system that today quenches the thirst of more than three million people in this city. The DWP and the MWD were the models used by President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, for the organization of the Tennessee Valley Project and, a few years later, for the Bonneville Power Administration on the Columbia River. There was no one in California for the first decades of the 20th Century who was more respected and admired than Mulholland. He built Los Angeles to be what it is today, and made possible for Southern California to be able to support more than 20 million people.”
From the Feature in this week’s report
