Agreement reached to repair Mono Lake damage
By Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times
Ending decades of bitter disputes over fragile Mono Lake, Los Angeles and conservationists on Friday announced an agreement to heal the environmental damage caused by diverting the lake’s eastern Sierra tributary streams into the city’s World War II-era aqueduct.
The controversy over alkaline Mono Lake, which is famous for its bizarre, craggy tufa formations and breeding grounds for sea gulls and migratory birds, is one of California’s longest-running environmental disputes.
The settlement resolves all of the issues among weary combatants, including the city of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, California Trout and the Mono Lake Committee.
It calls for construction of a $15-million adjustable gate in Grant Dam, an earthen structure 87 feet high and 700 feet long designed to impound tributary water. The goal is to release pulses of water along a seven-mile stretch of Rush Creek to mimic annual flood cycles, distributing willow seeds and promoting healthy trout populations. The settlement will not affect water levels at Mono Lake.
I thought the level of Mono Lake was being raised back to levels before Los Angeles started taking water which would normally have gone there.
Tahoeadvocate, I think what they did years back is to reroute portions of the streams the LA water poachers had diverted, back to Mono Lake and just raise it enough to erase the land bridge to Negit island, where 95% of all California gulls are bred and hatched, and whose populations were being decimated by coyotes.
LADWP (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) has been the source of environmental and economic evil in the Owens Valley for almost a century.
Anyone: Environmentalists, Liberals, Libertarians (the non-Ayn Rand ones) and just plain folks who want to defend the rights of people who are being overwhelmed by the rich and powerful (and, in this case, I’m not even referring to a Bloomberg or a Trump)need to look at what’s been done in the Owens Valley and jump to the defense of the residents who are more than overwhelmed by the political powers to their south.
I didn’t live in the Owens Valley so when they came for them I did nothing . . . . . .