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Chapter 7: Colorado River
Water
first pipeline because of the warti
me
emergency. Since the country was no longer
at war, the Bureau of Reclamation could not
fund a project that would provide urban water
use
—
unless Congress ordered the Navy to
request them to do so. The Water Authority
embarked upon the arduous task of creating
a united front from a group of skeptical parties
to appeal to Congress.
This effort to create consensus was spear-
headed by Fred Heilbron, the first chairman
of the Water Authority. He first had to con-
vince the city of San Diego, which had
enough water at the moment, to stand
behind something that would benefit the
county at large. Then, he went to work to
garner
Metropolitan’s support: he and
Jennings, the counsel to the Water Authority,
learned about a breakfast
meeting between
the Secretary of the Navy and the president
of
Metropolitan’s board of directors, Joseph
Jensen. Though not invited, Heilbron and
Jennings appeared anyway and took seats
directly across from the Secretary. Jennings
jumped into conversation with the Secretary,
fervently explaining why San Diego needed
the pipeline and needed Metropolitan to pay
half the cost. The Secretary turned to
Jensen and said, “I presume that
Metro-
politan recognizes this situation and is willing
to go along with it,” and then left before
Jensen could object. After that victory,
Heilbron enlisted three people to lobby
Congress: two United States senators from
California,
William Fife Knowland and Richard
M. Nixon, as well as a young congressman
from San Diego County, Clinton McKinnon.
8
The Water Committee of the San Diego
Chamber of
Commerce put together an
i
mpassioned book, For the Want of a Nail,
to further plead the cause.
The effort paid off. In 1954, the second
pipeline of the San Vicente Aqueduct, which
is parallel to and the same size as the first,
began delivering water. Even this doubling
of capacity was insufficient. The Water
Authority now had 18 member agencies and
four ti
mes the service area it had when it
was formed.
In 1961, a third pipeline, called Pipeline 3,
was built in a second aqueduct along a
different course, this one much closer to the
coast. Al
most three-ti
mes larger than the
first pipe, it delivered an additional 170,000
acre-feet per year. The Water Authority’s
service area had increased 30 percent in
population from the 1950s. Now it served
95 percent of the county’s residents.
“AQUEDUCTS” AND “PIPELINES”
In the parlance of San Diego water, the words
“aqueduct” and “pipeline” can be confusing.
“Aqueduct” is used to mean the land through
which the pipelines run, rather than the pipes
themselves. Thus, the First San Diego Aqueduct
actually carries two separate and distinct pipes,
Pipeline 1 and Pipeline 2. At the present ti
me,
Colorado River and Northern California water
flows to San Diego through five pipelines in two
different aqueducts.