Mulholland, William

Born in Belfast, Ireland, on September 11, 1855, William Mulholland emigrated to the United States in 1874 and settled in Los Angeles, California, where he died on July 23, 1935. A self-taught hydraulic engineer, he was the superintendent of the water supply system of Los Angeles from 1886 to 1928 and was responsible for the design and construction of aqueducts to augment the city's meager local resources with water carried hundreds of miles across deserts and mountains. Without this abundant additional supply, the growth of a great urban center in the semiarid Los Angeles basin would have been impossible.

When Mulholland arrived in Los Angeles in 1877, he took a job as a manual laborer with the City Water Company. The capacity for hard work, a forceful personality, and assiduous study in his off-duty hours resulted in his rise to the position of superintendent in less than a decade. In 1901, when the city purchased the private water company, Mulholland was retained as chief administrator of the municipal system, becoming both a public official and a symbol of the Progressive Era's ideals of public interest and competent stewardship of natural resources. Known as “The Chief” by Angelenos, who responded with affection to his colorful personality and respected his efforts to improve water quality and reduce waste, he was also widely sought as a professional consultant.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, Mulholland's personal success coincided with a rapid growth in the population of Los Angeles—to more than 100,000—and a period of severe drought throughout the Southwest. Warning that the city could not continue to develop, and might even decline, without much more water than was available locally, Mulholland and his associates conceived the idea of a 250-mile aqueduct to bring water from Owens Valley, east of the Sierra Nevada, where much of the mountain snowmelt ran into interior lakes and evaporated, mostly unused by local ranchers. The construction of such an aqueduct across the Mojave Desert and through the Tehachapi Mountains, however, was a project of almost unprecedented expense and complexity and required funding legal authorizations before the work could begin. As chief engineer, Mulholland was active at every level, even personally urging President Theodore Roosevelt to support the city's request to build across federal lands.

[Page 503]When Owens Valley water began flowing to Los Angeles in 1913, it increased the city's water supply tenfold, and it still supplies most of the city's domestic needs, although continued growth spurred The Chief to initiate another aqueduct from the Colorado River in the 1920s. In 1928, the collapse of St. Francis Dam caused hundreds of deaths and massive destruction of property in the Santa Clara Valley, damaging Mulholland's reputation and prompting him to retire. The disaster also reanimated criticisms of the ethics of pro-growth Los Angeles officials and their contention that the principle of the greatest good to the greatest number justified what residents of the Owens Valley continued to regard as the theft of their water.