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July 25, 2025
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Uniquely Metropolitan
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California might not be a household name. But if you’re a Southern Californian, there’s a good chance you get some of your water through Metropolitan. We serve 26 public water agencies — cities, municipal water districts and one county water authority — that then deliver supplies directly or indirectly to nearly 19 million people in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura counties.
We have imported water from the Colorado River since 1941 and from Northern California since the early 1970s. We are the largest single contractor of the State Water Project and a major supporter of Southern California water conservation and water recycling programs, along with other local water management activities.
Whether it’s historic drought or the longer-term threat of climate change, we’re here to protect the region and provide high-quality affordable water in an environmentally responsible way.
Read 2025 Leadership Today Water Tomorrow.
Adapting to
Growing Demand
By 1920, Los Angeles had grown to a million residents. Water shortages were on the horizon. Leaders were concerned the desert would reclaim the land as cities battled each other over water rights and worried that Los Angeles would annex them for their water. Southern Californians united around an ambitious dream to bring Colorado River water across the Mojave Desert. Their vehicle — the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, created by state law in 1928.
Our founding mission: to build and operate the Colorado River Aqueduct. The first Board of Directors met in Pasadena at the historic Huntington hotel in 1928. W.P. Whitsett, the founder of the community of Van Nuys, was elected chairman.
Metropolitan helped forge landmark federal agreements like the Boulder Canyon Project Act, which divided up the Colorado River water supply and led to the creation of Hoover Dam. Voters overwhelmingly approved a $220 million Depression-era bond that provided jobs to 35,000 — tunnel borers, miners, engineers, cooks and more. That would be the equivalent of a $3.75 billion investment today. Workers toiled in 120-degree heat on the 242-mile Colorado River Aqueduct, building 150 miles of canals, siphons, conduit and pipelines. We erected five pumping plants to lift water over mountains so deliveries could then flow west by gravity. We blasted 90-plus miles of tunnels, including a waterway under Mt. Jacinto, where crews battled columns of water 600 feet high.
“This has been just about the roughest, toughest tunnel job in construction history. These tunnel men have accomplished what many persons said could never be done.”
—W.P. Whitsett, Metropolitan board chair, 1938
History Alive
On June 17, 1941, a valve was turned from the new F.E. Weymouth Water Softening Plant and for the first time water flowed to the city of Pasadena, one of the original 13 cities whose voters approved the 1933 aqueduct construction bond. By the end of July, water would flow to Beverly Hills, Burbank, Compton and Santa Monica. Orange County would soon follow.
As the final countdown began to delivery day, it was a time of promise and uncertainty. Slugger Joe DiMaggio was in the middle of his 56-game hitting streak and heavyweight champion Joe Louis was racking up a string of knockouts. Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington were cutting records like “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” and “Take the A-Train.”
The first commercial TV broadcasts were weeks away. Across the Atlantic Ocean, World War II raged from Belgium to Britain as Nazi Germany tightened its grip on much of Europe. For weeks, America had been in a state of emergency because of Axis threats, and six months later, the Pearl Harbor attack would plunge the nation into war.
The new aqueduct provided crucial support to the war effort, and years after the war ended, each generation of Southern Californians has risen to the challenge of preserving water reliability to a region and its industries that took their place on the world’s stage.
Collection Highlights.
Colorado River Aqueduct: Survey Galleries
A rotating selection of late 1920s and early 1930s black and white photographs of the landscape that surveyors visited to map out the route of the Colorado River Aqueduct through pristine Southern California wilderness. Key photographs feature flora and fauna of the desert.
Colorado River Aqueduct: Construction Galleries
A rotating selection of black and white photos focusing on distinct areas of construction during building of the Colorado River Aqueduct in the 1930s. Key photographs demonstrate engineering and construction technology of the time.
Colorado River Aqueduct: People Galleries
A rotating selection of black and white photos of people who were involved in the building of the Colorado River Aqueduct. Key photographs span a variety of people, from construction workers, engineers, office staff, construction camp employees, leaders, and other contributors.
Learn about Metropolitan’s early days through the film and voices of the people who built and witnessed what is considered one of the nation’s greatest civil engineering feats.
Thirteen Golden Cities
In late 1938, Metropolitan released this motion picture to major Southland movie theaters and schools that detailed the story of the Colorado River Aqueduct project with a background of California's romantic and colorful history. The film was created to give a vivid account of the men and women involved in this historic project.
The Colorado River Aqueduct
This silent film (recently set to music) was created by Metropolitan in 1938 to record the history and details of the building the Colorado River Aqueduct and its delivery of water to 13 original cities.
The Dream Comes True
A video history of Metropolitan, including early clips that show the 1928 building of the Colorado River aqueduct and how the district has evolved to keep step with public values such as water quality and stewardship.
Radio Broadcasts
In the 1930s to the late 1940s, Metropolitan’s public affairs office wrote, produced and aired an extensive collection of radio programs. Listen to some of the audio treasures from our archives.
Spearheading Innovation
Innovation has been a hallmark of Metropolitan’s planning and operations since our early days. We provided medical care to workers through a nickle-a-day payroll deduction plan, working with the doctor who would later use this as the model for Kaiser Permanente. We built a pioneering water treatment plant in La Verne that was the largest of its kind. On June 17, 1941, we began delivering water to Pasadena as supplies coursed into a two-county area, linked by a vast network of tunnels and feeder lines snaking beneath the streets of 13 cities. Our water helped build Navy ships during World War II and supported the post-war boom. Faced with pleas to share our Colorado River bounty, we devised an annexation system that allowed Metropolitan to grow to cover six counties.
As Southern California’s population swelled, water demands grew with it. So, when Gov. Pat Brown sought to realize the decades-old dream of building a water system that would serve two-thirds of the state, he knew Metropolitan was crucial to its success. A former San Francisco mayor with Sacramento Valley farming roots, Brown held a series of increasingly heated talks with Metropolitan board chair Joseph Jensen over financial issues. Then came an 11th-hour reversal by the Los Angeles delegation and the Metropolitan board to support the project — a week before a November 1960 statewide election in which the bond measure narrowly passed.
Metropolitan signed a contract providing rights to more than 1.9 million acre-feet of water, when available. (In 2018, the contract was extended to 2085.) Water from the west branch of the California Aqueduct began flowing into Lake Castaic in January 1972, and in March 1973, work wrapped up on the East Branch, bringing water into Lake Perris. This also initiated an annual ritual where the state announces what percentage of the contracted amount of water will be delivered to Metropolitan and other State Water Project contractors. The annual allocation depends on the amount of Sierra snowpack and precipitation to ultimately deliver through the system, and, more recently, also on the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem.
We began incentivizing our members to store our water in their local groundwater basins for drier times. An extended drought prompted our 1990s shift into conservation, recycling and groundwater cleanup and construction of Diamond Valley Lake. We also began putting forth new ideas, like purchasing conserved water from farmers. When 21st Century demands and drought pressured the Colorado River, our creative alliances with farmers and southwest states plugged the gap. When contamination and stricter standards threatened supplies, we served as a key backup, investing millions in treatment upgrades and protecting water in faraway rivers. We buffered the region from historic 2010s drought as we expanded storage, invested hundreds of millions in conservation and sought a long-term balanced solution to the water supply and environmental issues in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, paving the way for even more breakthroughs in the 2020s.
The heroic efforts that sent water across the desert and flowing into Southern California 75 years ago have inspired Metropolitan and its 26 member public agencies to make sure the promise of water reliability is one that will always be kept.
1928
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is formed to build the Colorado River Aqueduct.
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1931
Voters approve $220 million bond for construction of the CRA.
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1933
Construction of CRA begins.
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1941
Metropolitan celebrates first deliveries of CRA water to Southern California.
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1959
California Legislature approves Burns-Porter Act authorizing Feather River Project, leading to construction of State Water Project.
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1960
Metropolitan endorses the construction of the State Water Project and soon after signs up to become largest contractor.
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1964
U.S. Supreme Court hands down Arizona vs. California decision.
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1972
First deliveries of SWP supplies reach Southern California.
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1976
California registers one of the worst single-year droughts in its history.
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1981
Metropolitan begins offering financial incentives for local investment in water recycling projects.
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1982
Proposition 9, authorizing the construction of the Peripheral Canal, is narrowly rejected by California voters.
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1989
Metropolitan and the Imperial Irrigation District enter into 35-year conservation agreement.
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1991
Entering fifth year of drought, Metropolitan cuts imported water deliveries to member agencies by 31 percent.
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1992
"March miracle” rainfall helps ease the drought of 1987-1992.
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1995
Metropolitan breaks ground on the construction of the Southland’s largest reservoir, later named Diamond Valley Lake.
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1996
Metropolitan’s board adopts first Integrated Water Resources Plan.
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2000
Diamond Valley Lake dedicated.
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2000
Colorado River enters historic period of drought.
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2003
The Quantification Settlement Agreement for the Colorado River completed.
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2003
Diamond Valley Lake opens to public recreation.
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2005
Metropolitan enters into 35-year land fallowing agreement with Palo Verde Irrigation District.
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2007
Colorado River Interim Surplus Guidelines enacted.
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2008
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service imposes significant restrictions on SWP pumping from the Delta to protect Delta smelt.
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2009
Responding to drought, Metropolitan reduces supplies delivered to its member public agencies for the first time since 1991.
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2009
California Legislature passes historic reforms for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and statewide water management.
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2014
Gov. Jerry Brown declares statewide drought emergency; SWP allocation set at 5 percent, lowest in history.
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2015
First-ever statewide mandatory water restrictions declared; Metropolitan board votes to restrict wholesale deliveries to its 26 member agencies.
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2015
Metropolitan launches turf removal rebate, under the nation’s largest water conservation program.
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2016
Metropolitan celebrates 75th anniversary of CRA deliveries to Southern California.
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2016
Metropolitan rolls back mandatory water restrictions.
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2017
Metropolitan board votes to support California WaterFix, a federal project to modernize the state water system and help improve supply reliability.
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2019
Gov. Gavin Newsom announces shift to a single-tunnel Delta Conveyance Project; Metropolitan supports the effort.
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2019
Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan is passed by all seven states and Congress.
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2019
Metropolitan and Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts begin operations at a 500,000-gallon-per-day, advanced purification demonstration facility in major step toward the potential construction of one of the largest water recycling plants in the nation.
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2019
Metropolitan and Bard Water District agree to landmark, seven-year seasonal land fallowing agreement.
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2020
Metropolitan continues to provide water supply reliability during the global COVID-19 pandemic.
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The mission of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is to provide its service area with adequate and reliable supplies of high-quality water to meet present and future needs in an environmentally and economically responsible way.
About the Seal
The Metropolitan Water District seal was officially adopted in 1933 after several other designs were considered in the years immediately following the district's creation in 1928.
Elements include the California bear, the California poppy, water flowing from a large tunnel, Colorado River Aqueduct construction workers flanked by desert plants, a gear signifying the wheels of industry, and links of a chain representing Metropolitan's founding cities.
The seal is frequently used on Metropolitan publications, materials and correspondence and is considered the district's official logo. Small changes were made to the seal over the years, mainly to add more color or enhance a highlight.
When visitors step into the Rotunda on the lobby floor of Metropolitan's Union Station headquarters, the seal is one of the first things they see. The seal has been revised over the years to reflect the growth and changes of the District, and the lobby seal reflects some of these changes. A second river was added on the right side of the seal to symbolize the addition of the State Water Project to the district's supply sources.
Read about how each MWD facility received their names.
The Metropolitan Water District Act & Code
It took a 1928 act of the state Legislature to establish Metropolitan through the Metropolitan Water District Act, known as the MWD Act, or simply the Act. It created Metropolitan as a special district to build the Colorado River Aqueduct. Like most public agencies, we have the right to set revenues (including water rates) issue bonds, execute contracts and exercise eminent domain. It also set up the annexation procedure by which new members could join the district.
The MWD Act gives Metropolitan the power to enact a levy that appears on every property tax bill in Metropolitan’s service area. Enacted in the days before Metropolitan had water to sell and relied on property tax revenues to repay its bonds, the Act created a weighted-voting system based on assessed valuation, where member agencies paying the most in property taxes got the most votes.
It has been amended numerous times over the years on issues dealing with board size, ethics, and conservation.
The Administrative Code is governed by our Board and sets up specific procedures and committees, spells out water rates, employee matters and ethics requirements.
Resources
Uniquely Metropolitan: A Regional Success Story
The images below are from our photo archives of the men and women, spanning from 1927 to 1941, who were all part of the engineering and construction project, the Colorado River Aqueduct.
