The bureaucracy that governs the water that originates as snowpack in the Sierra Mountains just cut off millions of customers from access to the second most necessary element to life.

We’re told this unprecedented reduction in water allocation is due to the ongoing drought that California has been in for the last couple of years, but that’s not the whole story.

Runaway environmentalism and a desire to limit the transport of water from its original source play a large role in the problem.

To understand California’s current water woes, one must know and understand an old American adage: “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting.” Erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, this somewhat brusque statement has roots deep in the last century’s water wars.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, range wars were erupting all over the Southwest. As people began settling parts of the country that were freshly mapped and sparsely inhabited, wars over access to and ownership of ground water began erupting like the geysers in Yosemite. This forced the U.S. government to step in with military force in several instances. It also sparked the most expensive lawsuit up to that point in U.S. history, whereby the Supreme Court had to settle the dispute between Arizona and California over access to certain water sources.

The question of who owns or has access to certain water sources continues in that grand tradition today. It is notably responsible for the massive failure to head off the ramifications of a persistent drought in California.

Things began really to heat up about the time the superintendent of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, William Mulholland, built the 223-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913. Folks who are at the source of the water in the north have been at war with those who use that water in the south, and thus California has been in a perpetual “cold war” (or what I refer to as a wet war) ever since.

I think little could have been done to mitigate this animosity at the time of the aqueduct’s construction, and certainly the growing sprawl of Southern California communities, dependent in part on water from the aqueduct, has only raised the stakes in the minds of folks from much more subdued communities in the north.

If you have an interest in the subject of the dawn of California’s water wars, I suggest you get a copy of the classic film, “Chinatown,” a whodunit that revolves around the building of the L.A. Aqueduct. I also suggest searching the topic: “the history of California’s water wars” in your favorite Internet search engine.

The construction of the California Aqueduct, which was spearheaded by our current governor’s father, is known now as the State Water Project. Its construction met with resistance similar to that of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. According to a timeline compiled by the California Department of Water Resources, municipalities including water agencies across the state demanded guarantees that northern California water agencies would be prevented from rescinding any water allocation deals made after the construction of the aqueduct.

Up in the Delta and Bay Area communities, residents were concerned that the transport of water to the south would jeopardize the waterways these communities depended on. The driving force behind support for the project came mainly from farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. Their main use for the water would be to recharge surface and underground sources that had suffered from over-pumping.

Environmental opposition that began even before the aqueducts were completed began to ramp up in the 1970s. This opposition led to a gradual reduction in the amount of water the city of Los Angeles takes from the L.A. Aqueduct.

With regard to the State Water Project, environmentalists contend in lawsuits that the pumping of water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is upsetting the fragile ecosystem that sustains a number of plant and animal species. The Delta Smelt, a 1-inch fish commonly used as bait, has led the PR campaign against pumping water through the Delta – but authorities on both sides of the issue agree that pumping water against the natural flow of the Delta is harming plants and animals.

The State Water contractors have attempted to solve both the issue of species decimation and the need to increase the flow and reliabilityof the water by proposing a project that would tunnel under the Delta to transport the water allocated to farms and beyond, while allowing the Delta itself to return to its natural state.

This immediately brings to mind visions of the failed “peripheral canal” plan that was first floated (pun intended) in the 1960s and defeated by voters in 1982. Using technology available at the time, the canal would have routed water from Northern California around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, dumping it into several regional aqueducts that would then take it to all parts of the state.

Recent advances in tunneling technology have been touted by the State Water contractors as mitigating much of the environmental impact a peripheral canal would cause.

Disagreement over how much water should be fed to communities south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is a huge sticking point in the creation of any plausible plan to mitigate the effects of a long-term drought. The current process by which water is transferred is outdated, inefficient and unacceptable to the environmental community. The answer, then, would obviously be to reroute the flow of water around or under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and establish a new, more efficient system of arties and water storage projects to ensure that future generations of Californians have reliable access to quality water.

Alas, forces at every level of government, all the way up to the president of the United States, seem resistant to a solution to the problem that would increase the flow of water south.

Kevin D. Korenthal is a 32-year resident of Santa Clarita and a former candidate for the Castaic Lake Water Agency board.