Digital Commons Network^™

Bill And Mike: How Two Irishmen Slaked The Thirst Of California’S Great Cities, Glen Gendzel

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Los Angeles and San Francisco, with nearly 20 million residents in their combined metropolitan areas, are California’s two most famous cities. Yet neither city has anything close to an adequate water supply within hundreds of miles. Tremendous feats of hydraulic engineering are necessary to store and transport water from California’s inland mountain rivers to big cities on the state’s semi-arid coast. In the early twentieth century, a pair of Irish immigrant engineers named Bill and Mike took charge of building these water systems for Los Angeles and San Francisco. William Mulholland (“Bill”) was a self-taught school dropout whose projects bringing …