Download or read book The Los Angeles River written by Blake Gumprecht and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2001-04-30 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the J. B. Jackson Prize from the Association of American Geographers Three centuries ago, the Los Angeles River meandered through marshes and forests of willow and sycamore. Trout spawned in its waters and grizzly bears roamed its shores. The bountiful environment the river helped create supported one of the largest concentrations of Indians in North America. Today, the river is made almost entirely of concrete. Chain-link fence and barbed wire line its course. Shopping carts and trash litter its channel. Little water flows in the river most of the year, and nearly all that does is treated sewage and oily street runoff. On much of its course, the river looks more like a deserted freeway than a river. The river's contemporary image belies its former character and its importance to the development of Southern California. Los Angeles would not exist were it not for the river, and the river was crucial to its growth. Recognizing its past and future potential, a potent movement has developed to revitalize its course. The Los Angeles River offers the first comprehensive account of a river that helped give birth to one of the world's great cities, significantly shaped its history, and promises to play a key role in its future.
Download or read book Los Angeles River written by Ted Elrick and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, the Los Angeles River was unpredictable--prone to flooding, a raging torrent during rare Southern California rains, and just a trickle and marshlands the rest of the year. To tame it, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers walled in the river after the disastrous 1938 flood. Decades later, roadside signs that proclaimed "Los Angeles River" prodded the question: How can this cement drain, strewn with trash and abandoned refrigerators, be considered a river? Abused through the 20th century, the L.A. River is in the midst of a comeback, thanks to the Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) and local governments. The realization that this arroyo has been as crucial to the development and growth of the city as the climate is again alive in the community. The vintage photographs for this historic and redemptive look at one of the great natural features of Los Angeles County were collected from private and public archives.--From publisher description.
Download or read book Water and Los Angeles written by William Deverell and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Los Angeles rose to significance in the first half of the twentieth century by way of its complex relationship to three rivers: the Los Angeles, the Owens, and the Colorado. The remarkable urban and suburban trajectory of southern California since then cannot be fully understood without reference to the ways in which each of these three river systems came to be connected to the future of the metropolitan region. This history of growth must be understood in full consideration of all three rivers and the challenges and opportunities they presented to those who would come to make Los Angeles a global power. Full of primary sources and original documents, Water and Los Angeles will be of interest to both students of Los Angeles and general readers interested in the origins of the city.
Download or read book The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River written by Ulysses L. Zemanova and published by . This book was released on 2008-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rivers in the Desert written by Margaret Leslie Davis and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise and fall of William Mulholland, and the story of L.A.’s disastrous dam collapse: “A dramatic saga of ambition, politics, money and betrayal” (Los Angeles Daily News). Rivers in the Desert follows the remarkable career of William Mulholland, the visionary who engineered the rise of Los Angeles as the greatest American city west of the Mississippi. He sought to transform the sparse and barren desert into an inhabitable environment by designing the longest aqueduct in the Western Hemisphere, bringing water from the mountains to support a large city. This “fascinating history” chronicles Mulholland’s dramatic ascension to wealth and fame—followed by his tragic downfall after the sudden collapse of the dam he had constructed to safeguard the water supply (Newsweek). The disaster, which killed at least five hundred people, caused his repudiation by allies, friends, and a previously adoring community. Epic in scope, Rivers in the Desert chronicles the history of Los Angeles and examines the tragic fate of the man who rescued it. “An arresting biography of William Mulholland, the visionary Los Angeles Water Department engineer . . . [his] personal and public dramas make for gripping reading.” —Publishers Weekly “A fascinating look at the political maneuvering and engineering marvels that moved the City of Angels into the first rank of American cities.” —Booklist
Download or read book A Study of Water Rights on the Los Angeles River California written by Edward Marshall Boggs and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hazardous Metropolis written by Jared Orsi and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-01-05 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An fascinating history of flood control efforts in Los Angeles from the 1870s to the present, showing how engineering has continually failed to contain nature. This book teaches us to think of cities as ecosystems.
Download or read book The Los Angeles River written by and published by . This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beautiful book features over 125 photographs taken by Los Angeles based photographer, Peter Bennett. His images span a twelve year period, one of the river's most transformative, when it went from a gated off flood channel to a popular destination for kayaking, biking and fishing. From the river's beginnings in the San Fernando Valley, to its mouth in Long Beach, this book tells the story of the river's 51-mile journey with lush images of riparian landscapes, dystopian urban cityscapes, historic downtown bridges, and its varied and exotic birdlife. Whatever your image of the LA River might be, the photos in this book will be sure to both surprise and entertain you. Foreword by actor/filmmaker Raphael Sbarge.
Download or read book The Biota of the Los Angeles River written by Kimball Garrett and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Control of Nature written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
Download or read book California Rivers and Streams written by Jeffrey F. Mount and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California Rivers and Streams provides a clear and informative overview of the physical and biological processes that shape California's rivers and watersheds. Jeffrey Mount introduces relevant basic principles of hydrology and geomorphology and applies them to an understanding of the differences in character of the state's many rivers. He then builds on this foundation by evaluating the impact on waterways of different land use practices—logging, mining, agriculture, flood control, urbanization, and water supply development. Water may be one of California's most valuable resources, but it is far from being one we control. In spite of channels, levees, lines and dams, the state's rivers still frequently flood, with devastating results. Almost all the rivers in California are dammed or diverted; with the booming population, there will be pressure for more intervention. Mount argues that Californians know little about how their rivers work and, more importantly, how and why land-use practices impact rivers. The forceful reconfiguration and redistribution of the rivers has already brought the state to a critical crossroads. California Rivers and Streams forces us to reevaluate our use of the state's rivers and offers a foundation for participating in the heated debates about their future.
Download or read book RIO LA written by Patt Morrison and published by Gibbs Smith. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling book about the Los Angeles River, originally published in 2001, is updated with an Afterword that includes the Los Angeles County 2021 Master Plan to improve the quality of life and ecosystem health in the region--all centered at the original source, the Los Angeles River. RIO-LA: Tales from the Los Angeles River 20th Anniversary Edition traces the history and lore of the Los Angeles River. When the book was first published in 2001, few people even regarded the river, but because of Morrison’s devotion to the topic, LA River has been rediscovered. The river has become the center of the county’s 2021 MasterPlan to reestablish it as the heart of the city, its lifeline to all things positive: an antidote to homelessness; a source of increased affordable housing; new jobs, good health; serenity. Morrison traces this rediscovery in her extensive new Afterword, following pages of river history, dating back to before the founding of the pueblo called Los Angeles. Together Morrison and Lamonica explore the river and the culture that evolves around this virtual oasis in a land of super highways and celluloid dreams.
Download or read book Stories from Quarantine written by The New York Times and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Previously published as The decameron project."
Download or read book Wild LA written by Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and published by Timber Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles may have a reputation as a concrete jungle, but in reality, it’s incredibly biodiverse, teeming with an amazing array of animals and plants. You just need to know where to find them. Wild LA—from the experts at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County—is the guidebook you’ve been waiting for. Equal parts natural history book, field guide, and trip planner, Wild LA has something for everyone. You’ll learn about the factors shaping LA nature—including flood, fire, and climate change—and find profiles of over one hundred local species, from sea turtles to rare plants to Hollywood's famous mountain lion, P-22. Also included are day trips that detail which natural wonders you can experience on hiking trails, in public parks, and in your own backyard.
Download or read book Flash Flood Forecasting Over Complex Terrain written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2005-01-28 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nation's network of more than 130 Next Generation Radars (NEXRADs) is used to detect wind and precipitation to help National Weather Service forecasters monitor and predict flash floods and other storms. This book assesses the performance of the Sulphur Mountain NEXRAD in Southern California, which has been scrutinized for its ability to detect precipitation in the atmosphere below 6000 feet. The book finds that the Sulphur Mountain NEXRAD provides crucial coverage of the lower atmosphere and is appropriately situated to assist the Los Angeles-Oxnard National Weather Service Forecast Office in successfully forecasting and warning of flash floods. The book concludes that, in general, NEXRAD technology is effective in mountainous terrain but can be improved.
Download or read book River Cities City Rivers written by Thaisa Way and published by Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection. This book was released on 2018-06-04 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history--shaping the development of urban landscapes and altering ecologies. Yet we have rarely given these urban landscapes their due. River Cities, City Rivers explores how such histories have shaped the present and how they might inform our visions of the future.
Download or read book A Study of Water Rights on the Los Angeles River California written by Edward Marshall Boggs and published by . This book was released on 1902* with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
