Altadena Water: The Last 100 Years

You may take it from me that it will be a good many years before Altadena ever becomes part of an incorporated city. We are happy just as we stand, and the only thing that could cause a change is the need of acquiring a better water supply.

[Altadena Improvement Association Officer, quoted in the Pasadena Star News, February 8, 1911.]

The Altadena Historical Society archives bulge with documentation of over a hundred years of fierce conflict over annexation and incorporation. There have been plenty of issues for this famously contentious town to argue about over the years, but continuing access to water would come to sorely test that zeal for independence. This streak still runs through Altadena today, reflected in a current prominent community member recently citing “our Live Free or Die mentality.”

In 1911, Joseph H. Tumbach, recently arrived from the Midwest, established an experimental poultry farm along Lincoln Avenue that within four years occupied 10-½ acres between Harriet and Montana Streets and housed 10,000 white leghorn hens. Together with a later plant in Riverside County, his egg-producing operation eventually became the largest on the west coast. Tumbach was later elected President of the West Altadena Improvement Association, and in 1919 led opposition to a Pasadena annexation proposal by protesting increased taxation to pay for water mains, and touting the protection of Altadena water rights and water quality. Right around this time Pasadena was actually exploring the possibility of incorporating the entire San Gabriel Mountain watershed north of the city into its own city limits, which would have included Altadena.

If water had a voice, we would hear it laughing at city limits, state lines, and even international borders. One of the only forces it truly respects is gravity, and in that context our local mountains are both a blessing and a curse. We welcome moderate winter rainfall flowing down and through the mountain watershed to replenish our local groundwater in the 40-square-mile Raymond Basin that sits below our part of the San Gabriel Valley.  But periodic catastrophic flooding can also wreak havoc; a particularly destructive flood in 1914 caused the formation of the Los Angeles County Flood Control District, and the subsequent construction of Devil’s Gate Dam in the Arroyo Seco, completed in 1920. “Feast or famine” in our local context translates to “deluge or drought.”

Our neighboring city of Pasadena realized by the 1920s that the local water table was becoming seriously compromised, and that even new well drilling was not going to keep up with rapidly increasing demand as the city grew.  Los Angeles had led the way in engineering its way out of scarcity in our semi-arid region when it tapped into the eastern Sierra Nevada snow runoff and began piping water from the Owens Valley via the Los Angeles Aqueduct beginning in 1913. In 1924, Pasadena voters followed Los Angeles’ lead and initiated its own local water importation project by passing almost $100 million in bond funds to purchase land in the San Gabriel River Canyon above Azusa, and later passed another $100 million bond measure to build a dam, reservoir, and miles of pipeline to bring San Gabriel River water to a reservoir in west Pasadena. Originally called the Pine Canyon Dam, it was later renamed Morris Dam, after Samuel Brooks Morris, the Pasadena Water Company’s chief construction engineer.  But the white-hot rate of urban growth in that era quickly outstripped freshwater supply in the region.

Altadena was also anticipating a future of dwindling groundwater. In 1924, the Altadena Citizens’ Association tasked a committee to investigate the legal angles of merging the three local water companies into a water district that might be able to take advantage of the prospect of imported water, but this proposal was never realized. Altadena residents continued to resist hitching themselves to continuing bond debt in the form of higher taxes, preferring a “pay as you go” approach to local development rather than long-term solutions with significant upfront investment.

In 1928, Pasadena partnered with Los Angeles and eleven other municipalities to incorporate the Metropolitan Water District, with the express purpose of funding and creating the infrastructure required to import water from the Colorado River to further supplement the rapidly depleting groundwater of the region. Though decried by the Los Angeles Times as “one of the most Socialistic proposals ever submitted to a California Legislature …[whose] defeat is deemed certain,” voters approved $220 million dollars of bond funding in 1931, and the 242-mile-long Colorado River Aqueduct was completed in 1941. 

Meanwhile, in 1928 Joseph Tumbach began a 32-year run as a director of the Lincoln Avenue Water Company, sixteen of which he served as president. His company had built four new wells by 1930, and in 1932 added two reservoirs on Sunset Ridge. In 1932 the Las Flores Water Company added a fifth reservoir on Poppy Street, and in 1933 the Rubio Canyon Land and Water Company built a new reservoir on Calaveras Street.  A proposed merger between the Rubio Canyon Land and Water Company and the Las Flores Water Company failed to materialize in 1931, and so our small mutual water companies built more and more local water infrastructure and maintained their independence, allowing Altadena to continue to cling to its own.

Despite these efforts, in 1935 the Legislative Committee of the Altadena Chamber of Commerce issued a report predicting a local water shortage as soon as 1948, and certainly no later than 1954. The report’s conclusions offered three solutions: “1) Form a water district and join the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, 2) Join the City of Pasadena which is already a member of Metropolitan Water, or 3) Do nothing and wish for lots of rain.” The community predictably roiled with its cyclical conflict over possible incorporation or annexation with Pasadena.

Joseph Tumbach emerged as a leader campaigning for the formation of the Foothill Municipal Water District. In May of 1951, the MWD Board of Directors approved the creation of this joint district for the foothill communities along the San Gabriel Mountains north of Glendale and Pasadena, and on September 13, 1951, The Altadenan reported the submission of 2241 signatures of Altadena residents, which along with signatures from residents of La Canada, La Crescenta, and Kinneloa Ranch, petitioned the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to call a special election that ultimately took place the following December. The Foothill Municipal Water District was formed, with Joseph Tumbach as its first president. A second election a year later incorporated the new district as a member of the regional Metropolitan Water District, and a successful bond measure on the ballot in June 1953 raised $500,000 to connect the three Altadena water companies to MWD via a new pumping plant and transmission lines. Altadena finally agreed to pay the price and was no longer solely dependent on local sources of water.

But regional population growth and development continued unabated during this post-war boom period, and the MWD began to look even farther afield for another source of imported water. In 1951 the “Feather River Project” was presented to the California Legislature; it included a proposed dam and reservoir near Oroville, in Butte County, north of Sacramento, and was spurred on by a massive series of storms in the winter of 1955-1956 that caused dozens of deaths and millions of dollars in damage, mostly in Sutter County and Yuba City. Almost a decade of fierce political conflict followed under the leadership of California Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. The California Water Resources Development Bond Act, also known as “Proposition One” on the November 1960 ballot, barely passed by a margin of fewer than 200,000 out of 5.8 million votes, and the California Water Project was born. It is the largest water project ever built with state funds, and spans over 705 miles from northern to southern California, including dams, storage facilities, pumping plants, and hydroelectric power plants. Since its completion in the 1970s, its waters have flowed southward in the 444-mile long California Aqueduct, accompanying travelers as they drive up and down the heart of the state on Interstate 5, and arriving in Altadena via the regional water district wholesalers (MWD and FMWD) to which our small local water companies have access. 

The turn of the new millennium inaugurated a multi-year drought on the Colorado River, and every year residents all over California anxiously await the news of the yearly Sierra snowpack measurement. Water consciousness has become a way of life all over the state, especially here in semi-arid southern California. Now our water providers are concerned with updating aging infrastructure, developing recycled water systems, improving stormwater capture and storage, maintaining safe water quality, and constructing emergency connections among agencies, but citizens have a role to play in household and workplace water conservation. Our pioneering forefathers created a garden out of a desert, but now it is up to us to contribute to creating a sustainable way to preserve the paradise we call Altadena.[Content]