TIDE TURNS IN L.A. WATER WAR.

Byline: Todd S. Purdum The New York Times

``It's not that you can't breathe,'' said Mark McCall, with gallows humor befitting a prematurely grizzled 49-year-old resident of this dusty village in the Owens Valley. ``You just don't want to.''

McCall's back yard abuts the dry bed of Owens Lake, a crusty lunar landscape of brackish pools and flaky salts and toxins that is the worst source of airborne pollution in the United States. The parched patch of 110 square miles is all that is left in the center of a once-fertile farming and mining community. Even the talc mill where McCall once worked is closed, and he is unemployed.

There is not the slightest mystery about where the water went: For 85 years, gravity has pulled it through a a 223-mile man-made aqueduct to build and sustain the artificially verdant sprawl of Los Angeles, and today it still supplies just over half the water for the United States' second-largest city.

But for the first time in the history of the longest-running water war in the West, Los Angeles, under intense pressure from state and federal regulators, may be forced to put some of the water back to help control dust storms that can carry 20 times the particle pollution allowed by federal law. That would be a precedent-shattering concession of complicity in one of the most celebrated water grabs of all time.

``We think that this is sort of David and Goliath meets `Chinatown,' '' said Ellen Hardebeck, air-pollution control officer of the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District, the state-chartered agency here that last year ordered Los Angeles to cover about one-third of the lake bed, partly with water, partly with 4 inches of gravel, and partly with vegetation, in an effort to hold down the dust.

In fact, the struggle is the stuff of legend, and Hardebeck was referring to the classic 1974 movie. ``Chinatown'' was inspired by the stealthy - though legal - efforts of Los Angeles city fathers to buy up land and water rights here in the early years of the century so the city could expand into land that they were buying up outside Los Angeles.

When William Mulholland, the visionary Los Angeles water czar who saw the potential of the Owens River's mountain runoff, officially opened the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, he watched the water gush down into the San Fernando Valley, then on the far northern outskirts of his fledgling city, and proclaimed in what remain fighting words here to this day: ``There it is. Take it.''

By the mid-1920s, Los Angeles was taking so much water that the lake dried up, and, not surprisingly, the city has resisted giving the water back. In December, it offered a counterproposal to do less than half of what the Owens Valley wants. When officials here rejected that, the city appealed to the state Air Resources Board, which has the final say because the state owns the lake bed.

The board took no action at its meeting last month and gave negotiators for the valley and city until the next board meeting, on June 25, to try to reach a compromise. If a state-approved plan is not in place by fall 1999, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has vowed to impose its own plan for bringing pollution within acceptable levels.

``Clearly, we have a responsibility to deal with the problem,'' said Gerald Gewe, executive assistant to the director of water services for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. ``But it's not a problem that was created overnight or that's going to be solved overnight.''

Officials from both sides spent the end of this week in secret negotiations, and the outcome is hard to predict. But their last public positions were far apart, and the staff of the State Air Resources Board has recommended a ruling in favor of Los Angeles.

The basic problem is not in dispute. On most days, the air here is splendidly clear, with breathtaking views across the valley to Mount Whitney, at 14,496 feet the highest point in the contiguous 48 states, and in summer, the lake bed is as hard and dry as concrete.

But on some two dozen days a year, mostly in spring and fall, residual moisture makes the lake's crust churn into crystals that become a whirlwind - of fine clay particles, salts, arsenic and other substances deposited over geologic time - covering cars, seeping through windows and threatening the lungs of perhaps 40,000 area residents.

The trouble has come in agreeing on a solution. A 1983 law requires Los Angeles to take ``reasonable'' measures, but city and valley officials have distinctly different views of what that means.

In its order, Great Basin proposed treating the worst 35 square miles of the lake with the mix of gravel, vegetation and water, which it estimated would take about 50,000 acre-feet of water a year, or about 15 percent of what the city takes from the valley each year. An acre-foot is the amount needed to cover an acre of land a foot deep, a little more than 325,000 gallons.

After six months of negotiations, Los Angeles countered in December with an offer to work on nine square miles, requiring about 20,000 acre-feet of water, with a promise to assess its progress and make adjustments after three years.

The city says the valley's proposal would cost it $58 million a year to replace Owens Valley water with other sources, probably from the Sacramento River Delta in the north, and to finance operations at the lake, along with $25 million annual debt service on the capital improvements that would be needed to put the plan in place.

Gewe of the Los Angeles water agency said that would mean a total cost of $75 million to $80 million a year out of the agency's overall revenues of about $400 million, and he warned that such increases would have to be passed on to customers in Los Angeles.

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Map

MAP: Los Angeles Aqueduct

The New York Times