Pleasant Valley Dam
Jean-Luc Henraux
A fictional dam is proposed to be constructed along the upper Owens River in rural California, east of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range. At a community hearing to evaluate the proposal, business interests grapple with longstanding local distrust of waterworks projects.
If the proposal comes to fruition, developers plan to name their new monuments the Pleasant Valley Dam and Pleasant Valley Reservoir, after the beautiful rocky valley they intend to flood. In Inyo County, California, approval for large-scale infrastructure projects on public land runs directly through county officials. However, local government support is no issue for the consortium of well-connected developers and businesses positioned to benefit from an increase in local electricity production. The project's real test lies with a countywide referendum set to appear on the upcoming November ballot. Inyo County is the second largest county in California by area, but it feels more like a small community to residents. Twenty thousand people occupy the county, most of whom live along the 395 Highway that cuts through the valley between the Sierra Nevadas and Inyo Mountain Range. Bishop, a town just outside Pleasant Valley, where the hearing is scheduled, houses just under four thousand people.
In a school auditorium, a crowd of concerned community members fix their eyes on the stage, where representatives from a consortium of project backers are summarizing the dam's benefits. The head of a construction company discusses dozens of jobs the project would create for locals, handing out branded hardhats to a few young men who appear interested in the work. Executives from Mammoth Mountain, a nearby ski resort, walk the crowd through the arithmetic of precisely estimated economic benefits they expect from the dam's construction. Local energy production would reduce the costs of artificial snowmaking, which would enable skiing through July Fourth weekend, which in turn would increase the number of tourists spending money at local restaurants, hotels, and heritage sites.
Fiscal projections and environmental concerns were being discussed in detail, but many in the crowd stayed focused on one theme that the developers diligently featured on most of the PowerPoint slides presented: autonomy. Many residents of Inyo County feared that any sort of public water works project was another attempt to divert resources from local residents to urban communities elsewhere in the state. Many participants attending the meeting descended from white farming communities in the county that were disenfranchised nearly a hundred ago by more powerful interests in Los Angeles, located four hours and a few hundred miles away. After many had moved to California from the Midwest in the late nineteenth century, farmers working the land along the Owens River witnessed the construction of the Los Angeles aqueduct system in the 1910s. A massive network of dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts ferried water hundreds of miles away from Inyo County to support the fast-growing coastal metropolis, which had tripled in population the decade prior and was beginning to experience severe water shortages.
Following the aqueduct project, the county's exploding population and economy were no longer threatened by the region's perilous lack of water. However, the gains to Los Angeles County were zero-sum. Back in Inyo, water became instantly scarce. A lack of rainfall meant that farmers had previously received most of their water from mountain runoff, water which flowed through the Owens River. Following the dam, water was redirected and farming became all but impossible in the arid region. Families were financially devastated. No longer able to persist on their own, parents and children followed the aqueducts to the coast and joined the urban community who devasted their previous home.
In the generations since, Inyo residents have driven away businesses and politicians that were remotely connected to coastal, urban interests. Mammoth Mountain, the county's largest earner and employer, draws hordes of out-of-towners that bring year-round business to the region, and is a tolerated exception. In the auditorium, local businesses began to express concern that the new proposed dams' electricity production would only serve mountain recreation consumed by wealthy non-residents. And underneath the layers of artificial snow, they asked, what of the region's natural attractions? The Pleasant Valley region was home to beautiful mountainous terrain where locals frequented to fly fish or camp on free public sites. Would residents be forced to lose their livelihood for the people of Los Angeles and San Francisco to play in their backyard?