Building the Aqueduct | Los Angeles Aqueduct Digital Platform

Building the Aqueduct

Thursday, October 31st, 2013

^{Steam Shovel Working in Large Rocks, A Collection of Scrapbooks (Collection Number 155). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.}

The scale of the aqueduct’s building project required a large workforce and careful coordination of the transportation of construction materials, machines, and mules. Roads needed to be cleared, tunnels driven through hard rock, local concrete plants built, and power, telegraph and telegram lines put up. Charles G. Hyde’s Complete Report on Construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct (1916) offers the most comprehensive account of the technological and administrative details of the project’s execution.

^{Board of Public Service Commissioners of the City of Los Angeles. Construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Final Report.}

^{Los Angeles: Department of Public Service of the City of Los Angeles, 1916.}

Archived photograph collections in libraries around southern California complement official histories of the aqueduct’s building and yield significant insights into the work and living conditions of the various ranks of laborers at construction camps, who numbered 3900 at their height. Archaeological evidence at the site of the Alabama Gates sites sheds further light on the challenges facing the lowest-paid construction workers which included extreme temperatures, high worker turnover, food shortages, and densely-inhabited tents. The workforce was ethnically diverse, with a great variety of recent European immigrants working alongside native-born white Americans and Canadians, Mexicans, and Asian-Americans; employees were highly stratified in terms of pay rank and occupation based on these ethnic differences.

^{Machine Drills at Work, Los Angeles Aqueduct}^(left)^{and "Holed" Tunnel No. 34, Los Angeles Aqueduct}^(right)

^{Collection of California postcards (Collection Number 1351). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.}

In the face of these inclement conditions, however, the project-contracted physician noted a worker mortality rate that, while significant, was still considerably below that of equivalent projects elsewhere in the country. Despite the practical difficulties of building the aqueduct, the engineers and workers enjoyed some notable successes. The tunneling crew at Elizabeth Tunnel completed their task 20 months ahead of schedule (motivated in part by result-based bonuses), creating a world record in the process and garnering international recognition.

^{A Timbered Tunnel--One of the Stages of Construction in Tunnel Building, A Collection of Scrapbooks (Collection Number 155). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.}

By Sara V. Torres, a Ph.D. candidate in English at UCLA and an assistant editor of Boom. Her research and teaching focus on medieval and early modern English literature and digital and environmental humanities. [svtorres@ucla.edu]