At its grand opening in 1913, the Los Angeles Aqueduct sent a torrent of fresh mountain water cascading into the Los Angeles valley to the cheers of an onlooking crowd of 30,000 people. The water, diverted from the Owens Valley more than 200 miles away, would fuel meteoric growth in the L.A. suburbs in the decades to come, but it would ultimately come at the cost of Owens Lake, the terminal lake from which the water was diverted, which effectively ran dry only 13 years later.