los angeles – American Disasters

April 14, 2014December 16, 2020

Watering a Wasteland: A Research Update

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In the past few weeks, I have worked to centralize the central topic of my proposal. My original idea was to analyze the collapse of the St. Francis Dam in the Santa Clarita Valley in Southern California within the context of the California Water Wars of the early twentieth century. However, as my research advanced, I decided to focus my topic on the Water Wars themselves as a disaster, analyzing how urbanization and city politics affected the irrigation of water sources in the Los Angeles area. The Water Wars, which began over a hundred years ago, continue to influence water politics in Southern California, creating animosity between urban and rural interests. I hope to focus my proposal on how farmers and ranchers, who had been largely starved of water for their agriculture and animals, responded (both legally and illegally) to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s continued attempts to syphon water from the Owens Valley, particularly in the 1920s. I have found great secondary sources that researched how rural communities mobilized to combat the LADWP officials, both in the courts and in the countryside. I continue to look for primary sources that can both detail how the urbanization of Los Angeles affected the distribution of water to farms and ranches, as well as how LADWP officials justified their expanded allocation of resources. On the whole, I hope to use Los Angeles as a case study of how unsustainable urban development can lead to cities being drains on resources and malignant forces on the environment as well as surrounding communities.

March 26, 2014December 16, 2020

Challenging Nature: Southern California and the Subsidization of Disaster

“And the mountains erupt, and the valley is sucked into cracks in the earth.”

There’s just something so incredibly ominous that permeates throughout the city of Los Angeles. Just yesterday, the nation’s second-largest city was ranked ninth by the Guardian in its list of the world’s highest-risk cities. Los Angeles’ location as a city is neither ideal nor safe. The city is built on the San Andreas Fault in a valley thickened by smog. L.A.’s lack of inherent water sources forced it to dry out the surrounding countryside through irrigation projects in the early 1900s, leading to lower rainfalls and rural drought (22). Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster attempts to determine why and how so many people populated a region so vulnerable. To Davis, shortsighted magisterial and economic decisions have put tens of millions of citizens at risk from earthquakes, drought, floods, wildfires, and a host of other disasters.

While Davis does not document a Gilded Age disaster, he argues that many policies adopted during the era had lasting impacts. Because the city had low seismic activity during its expansion period, urban planners had no idea that there would be more than 50 active faults underneath the city (27). The biggest problem of the age was the water supply, which city officials remedied by syphoning off water from rural rivers and lakes into aqueducts for the city (more research to come on that soon!). As a result, farmers and ranchers were dried out of their land and forced to move into the increasingly dangerous city limits (21). Economic interests were not deterred, but rather emboldened, by the possibility of disaster. The boosterism of the Gilded Age (as noted by Rozario) merely encouraged homeowners and businesses to rebuild right exactly where they were whenever disaster struck.

Like Dan noted earlier, L.A.’s short-term economic offerings always seemed to surpass its natural dangers for potential residents. Anyone who observes Davis’ sources would cringe at the thought of moving to Southern Cal: just look at the rainfall totals, the witness accounts of people “sucked into deadly vortices,” or the monetary damage of the floods, fires, and earthquakes in the last century (5). However, the city fortified itself ecologically, economically, and culturally as a city too big to be abandoned. In Ecology of Fear, Davis makes a vital argument against the economic systems that incentivize hazardous urban planning. L.A., a glaring example of the practice, is indeed a city challenging nature. At this very moment, it waits patiently and ominously for nature to respond to its defiance.

“L.A., uptight, city in the smog… Don’t you wish that you could be here too?”

March 26, 2014December 16, 2020

Keynes loves SoCal

What really struck me about the readings for today is the deep economic implications that disasters and potential disasters have. I really liked Betsy’s analysis of Steinberg’s claim that the business elites of San Francisco cried “fire” and not “earthquake” to ensure that capital continued to flow into the city. The assertion that this was a freak accident was not just lying to ensure the flow of capital, but Californians really did refuse to accept the dangerous environment that they were living in. Since so much has been written about Steinberg, and because I find that Davis provides some unique and compelling economic arguments, I am choosing to focus on Los Angeles and its disaster culture.

I first found it really interesting that disasters in Los Angeles can essentially be used to prove Keynesian economics correct. Davis quotes a veteran reporter who claimed, “For the Clinton Administration, the Los Angeles earthquake has provided a politically salable reason for doing what it has sought to do for most of its first year in power: pump billions of dollars into Southern California’s ailing economy.” (Davis 48) After relief was provided, especially to economically important sectors, (transportation, technology and the wealthy) the economy of SoCal began to heat up again and return to its status as the most economically productive region of the country. For me this both strongly affirmed the legitimacy of Keynesian economics and highlighted the usefulness of disasters in testing economic theory because essentially post-disaster the entire economy needs to be rebuilt.

I also think it is worth noting that in terms of disaster relief, not much has changed since the Gilded Age, the policy is help the wealthy first, and maybe help the poor if there is still enough time and money left. The image of the houses of the rich in Malibu being rebuilt very quickly and with federal money, while poor elderly minorities were homeless really stuck out to me. This image also reminded me of what we learned about the San Francisco earthquake where the wealthy whites used the earthquake as an excuse to shoot the poor chinese and even had government permission. This government sanctioned inequality provides for an complex ethical debate. Who should we help first? While the poor need it most, the wealthy are most important to getting the economy back on track. It is a complicated issue with no clear answer.