Posted on 11/27/2016 10:12:36 AM PST by Mariner
LOS BANOS - The helicopter landed in the western hills above the San Joaquin Valley and out of the dust walked President John F. Kennedy.
It was Aug. 18, 1962, and the sun would not let go. In the hollow of the mountain, where California was about to build its newest reservoir, the air felt like a blast furnace. Summer had baked the earth to a tan and shrunken form. The hills turned to hide. Though not a drop of rain had fallen from the sky since spring, no one in the assembled crowd, certainly not the cotton kings, thought of this as drought.
Going dry for eight months was California’s condition. And here was the president coming west to deliver California’s fix. A son of Massachusetts, he knew this was a place where “things do not happen but are made to happen.” Looking down on the Valley, he could see nature’s aridity and man’s answer side by side. Desert and farm, salt and fruit. The difference was the reach of an irrigation canal.
Two Irish American politicians at the peak of their power, JFK and Gov. Pat Brown, came together that day outside Los Banos, “the baths,” to build the nation’s largest off-stream earthen reservoir. No partnership between Washington, D.C., and Sacramento had ever tackled a project of such monument. By dint of the new reservoir and an aqueduct that sent water from one end of California to the other, the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project forever joined hands.
But the building of the San Luis Reservoir and canal stands out in the annals of western reclamation for a more inglorious reason. The Westlands Water District, 600,000 acres of irrigated agriculture, controlled nearly all the federal water that moved through the new plumbing.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
Los Banos= the bathrooms ?
Not a big fan of federal intervention at all, but since that bridge has already been crossed and crossed badly, declare continued, successful agricultural production in CA to be a national security issue and authorize immediate construction of large desalinization plants in CA. The enviros don’t give a crap about snail darters, they want to cripple this country economically. Take that away from them as much as possible, while work continues toward shutting down the federal agencies responsible for such economic carnage in the name of environmental nutbaggery.
It’s an apt name for the place.
California must quit robbing Colorado of its water.
Go find your own water. First fire your EnviroWackos.
“Los Banos= the bathrooms ?”
Los cuartos de banos = bathrooms
It is physically impossible for California to be robbing Colorado of any water.
When I visited Tijuana and heard the call of nature, I would ask a local, Donde es el bano, por favor? and they gave me directions.
I shoulda said, `Donde esta los cuartos de banos’ ?
I shoulda said,...Hey, M’Fer. Don’t you speak English? No wonder you live in a shiitehole.
Yeah, it was a tourist trap just off Avenida Revoluccion, but I was in their country, I tried to learn some basic phrases.
But I was just visiting.
Our disgruntled, uninvited, permanent “guests” won’t bother to learn English.
The Yeb Bush household: his munchkin wife has been in the country how many decades? She hasn’t bothered. They speak Spanish. Que caga para las aves.
Spot on 100%.
Those people typify liberalism. And they don’t care about hardship, economic privation, or anything else.
They have gotten in the way of water, energy, and industry.
A pox on all of them.
I lived in the shadow of the San Luis dam in Los Banos and work a mile from the “fore bay” in Santa Nella. That was back when the San Joaquin was prosperous and the California aqueduct still irrigated the valley.
If ever an article needed a tl:dr summary, it is this one. What wretched writing.
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Dreadful.
I believe our FRiend The Next meant “THE Colorado”, as in the river.
After going through the US/Mex border, it peters out something like 8 miles from the Sea of Cortez. You can walk the riverbed all the way to the sea.
“California must quit robbing Colorado of its water.”
Make that Southern California, because they’ve been stealing our water from the North for just as long. Personally, if the Colorado River “entitlement” to SoCal goes away, so much the better. Then we can excise that wasteland and let Hollywood fight it out with the Mexican illegals. The Los Angeles Water and Power Agency is having it’s water-rapist tendencies curtailed by the courts. The’ve already lost a big chunk of the water they were taking from the Owens River because it was causing Mono Lake to dry up.
“It is physically impossible for California to be robbing Colorado of any water. “
That is simply not true. The FedGov has been allocating the water in the Colorado River since the days when Hoover Dam was built. The problem for Southern California is that now Arizona is laying claim to it’s full share of that water, so SoCal is having to cut back on what it takes.
I hope Trump understands all this cause I don’t. I tried out of faith to the
great valley where i first practiced weather forecasting. Mather AFB. My son was born there and my wife graduated from Sac State?
Maybe I’ll buy the book.
“What wretched writing.” I agree 100%. My car once broke down on Hwy. 5 and then a tow truck delivered me and my car to an Arco station in Los Banos several years ago. There a friendly mechanic replaced the water pump “con rapidez”.
I wished to read the article from the Sac Bee so that I can make a cool reply. However, I was unable to discover the thesis of the article after reading four paragraphs. Waste of time.
“Los banos” = the bathrooms.
After going through the US/Mex border, it peters out something like 8 miles from the Sea of Cortez. You can walk the riverbed all the way to the sea.
Could well be the river, rather than the state.
However, that raises another question. Just who is it that is "robbing" the Colorado?
The Upper Basin includes Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah, the Lower Basin includes Nevada, Arizona and California, plus Baja California and Sonora. All nine of these entities are entitled to a share of its water by riverine law.
Presumably, the governing Colorado River Compact provides that a certain amount of water actually reaches the sea. But, since the bed has been bone dry from near Yuma to the Gulf of California for years, somebody is using more than their share.
Is it California? Or is it somebody else?
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