The Lake Without Water : ‘Save Mono Lake,’ indeed; a settlement is long overdue

The recent “photo opportunity” at the Department of Water and Power building downtown was gimmicky.

To shouts of “Save Mono Lake,” 90 cyclists each filled a vial with water from the building’s large reflecting pool and strapped the capped containers onto their bikes. They then pedaled north on a six-day journey to the struggling lake to symbolically “rehydrate” it with DWP water.

Kind of silly. But it did dramatize the fragile condition of Mono Lake, “dehydrated” by decades of diversions from its tributaries to slake the Los Angeles basin’s seemingly unquenchable thirst.

Mono Lake sits near the eastern edge of Yosemite National Park. The saline lake, with its tufas, or stone spires, contains no fish but supports a brine shrimp population that feeds vast numbers of nesting and migratory birds.

Mono Lake’s water comes largely from Sierra snowmelt in five streams. But beginning in 1940 the DWP acquired the right to appropriate virtually the entire flow of four of those streams. As a result, the lake’s level has fallen so far that, by 1980, its two principal islands became a peninsula, exposing the gull rookery there to predators, and imperiling the lake’s scenic beauty.

In 1983, the California Supreme Court enjoined the DWP from further diversions of Mono Lake streams pending a state decision on a permanent water level to ensure the lake’s continued ecologic viability, or an out of court settlement with the DWP.

Nine years and a long drought have intervened. The administrative process of setting a viable, permanent lake level proceeds at the pace of a drippy faucet. State legislation enacted in 1989 offered the DWP an incentive to settle by helping fund its acquisition of new water supplies. After so much delay, such a settlement is long overdue.