Malleable infrastructures: Crisis and the engineering of political ecologies in Southern California

Abstract

This paper examines the sociotechnical imaginaries shaping the development, retrofit, and multiple uses of water infrastructure in response to crisis. Focusing on Morris Dam, located on the San Gabriel River in Los Angeles County, I ground my analysis in a case that highlights how the interactions between professional engineering and scientific practice, political aims and goals, and environmental conditions shape infrastructural form and function. Analysing three different phases in the infrastructure’s lifespan, I argue that infrastructures exist in and beyond their initial functions as metabolic conduits, as they take on new meanings in relation to shifting social, political, and environmental crises. In the first phase, I focus on the sociotechnical imaginaries and forms of politics that take shape around the development of Morris Dam as a modernization project. In the next phase, I draw attention to the unintended configurations of science, nature, and naval weapons development that emerged at Morris Dam in the mid-20th century and continued through the Cold War. The final phase examines the retrofitting process that re-modernized the dam as a technology to advance water resources sustainability and resilience in the region. Together, I use these different forms of infrastructural relations to illustrate how malleability works as an infrastructural feature and political process enabling infrastructural resilience and attachment to changing sociotechnical imaginaries over time.

Keywords

Sociotechnical imaginaries techno-politics political ecology dams water Los Angeles infrastructure

Introduction

The control, capture, and manipulation of water are at the centre of Los Angeles’s growth as a metropolitan power. Whether it was the imperial acquisition of water rights in the Owens Valley, the harnessing of water and energy from the Colorado River, or the transformation of the Los Angeles River into a concrete flood control channel, the engineering of these waterways shaped the development of greater Los Angeles (Deverell and Sitton, 2017). Overcoming the temporal cycles of floods and droughts, as well as the spatial distribution of water supplies, developed into fundamental problems that engineering practice sought to resolve throughout the region. Consequently, these rivers lost much of their natural edifice through engineering and technocratic practices that transformed them into infrastructures connecting and reconfiguring flows and relationships between nature, society, and technology. By means of dams, aqueducts, channels, sewers, pipes, and canals, engineers would leave an undeniably large infrastructural footprint across the American West as they sought to resolve the dilemmas imposed by nature (Worster, 1985). Remaking nature through engineering expertise also reconfigured social life, shaping expectations and promises of what greater Los Angeles could be, but without entirely subduing the influence of the material world.

Far from merely a technocratic practice, as Björkman and Harris (2018) note, engineering is immersed within spatial representations, contentious politics, and broader processes of urbanization. The engineering of infrastructures, in other words, is a political--ecological process that entails the reconfiguration of sociotechnical systems. While scholars have recently framed infrastructures as open-ended process characterized by multiple temporalities of maintenance, decay, and retrofit (Graham and McFarlane, 2015; Gupta, 2018; Howe et al., 2015), what are the political, ecological, and technological modes influencing how infrastructures take on new and different lives and temporalities? To answer this question, I examine Morris Dam, located on the San Gabriel River in Southern California, and the role of engineers in adapting infrastructures to new sociotechnical imaginaries as they arise in response to different forms of crisis. Through three different periods, I show how engineers associated with Morris Dam adopt and apply multiple sociotechnical imaginaries in order to resolve crisis and in the process enrol Morris Dam into new trajectories of use and significance.

Viewing infrastructures as a process, I argue, pushes the analysis of infrastructures to how they exist beyond their initial functions as metabolic conduits as they take on new meaning in relation to shifting social, political, and environmental conditions. While metabolism has been a strong focal point of urban political ecology, engineers have rarely been the subject of research (Björkman and Harris, 2018). The focus on engineers and their practices, I suggest, brings a lens to how different techniques, standards, rules, and metrics structure urban metabolic processes through regimes of knowledge and power. It is in moments of crisis, I argue, that new or competing visions can exceed or entrench existing sociotechnical regimes. Designing infrastructure alongside transformational change hinges on the choices made in these moments.

In this paper, I focus on Morris Dam and the waters of the San Gabriel River as means to offer a lens into the transformation of infrastructural lives (Figure 1). I suggest that this involves both the materiality of technological objects as well as the political goals that shape and form around infrastructural development and technocratic governance and decision-making. Similar to the Los Angeles River, the San Gabriel River is a highly engineered waterway – transformed into a flood control channel and storm drain through concrete. The logics and practices of engineers produced a distinct urban political ecology stretching from the mountains to the sea – one not bounded by the city-scale (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015). Water infrastructure, in particular, served as an essential apparatus in assembling the state of California by connecting science, engineering, and governance (Carroll, 2012). However, the dams and concrete channels that influence the flow of the San Gabriel River are more than fixed matter. Instead, dams are ‘thick with politics’ (Bijker, 2007), taking the material form of a set of beliefs, practices, and power relations that can extend across the globe.

Among the various waterways of the greater Los Angeles region, attention typically turns towards the Los Angeles River, or the waters of the Owens Valley, as the quintessential examples of uneven power relations shaping resource and infrastructural politics. In many ways, consideration should focus there instead of the San Gabriel River and the various infrastructures that have emerged around it. Both the Owens River and Los Angeles River figure prominently in noir fiction and popular imaginations of the city and region. Drawing inspiration from conflicts in the Owens Valley, for example, Roman Polanski’s (1974) Chinatown tells the conspiratorial story of wealthy businessmen plotting, through murder and intimidation, to bring Sierra Nevada water to newly acquired agricultural land in the San Fernando Valley through the construction of an aqueduct. The Los Angeles River has also fuelled the public and cultural imagination, providing the backdrop for movies and bringing together poets, artists, activists, planners, and other constituencies through restoration efforts (Desfor and Keil, 2004; Gandy, 2014; Wolch, 2007).

In contrast, the San Gabriel River, which flows to the east of downtown Los Angeles before reaching the ocean at Long Beach, is ‘the river that Los Angeles tamed, plundered, and forgot’ (Pringle, 2003). Much like the infrastructures operating in the background of modern life, the San Gabriel River has supported the promises and visions of developers, industries, and politicians. For the construction industries, the San Gabriel River and its alluvial deposits provided abundant sources of gravel, sand, and rock. These aggregate resources offered key metabolic inputs – concrete and asphalt – into Los Angeles’s urbanization process. Moreover, Morris Dam offers an important example in how infrastructures are built and adapted in response to different forms of crisis, political aims, and social imaginations to take on new uses. These uses reflect shifting social and environmental realities but can also enrol infrastructures into networks that exceed or entrench the primary metabolic function of the infrastructure (Figure 1).

The focus of this paper is on how infrastructures take on multiple social and material lives through the work of engineers and the social visions they apply in relation to state goals and shifting political--ecological conditions. In particular, Morris Dam offers insight into infrastructural malleability and how malleability is a fundamental feature shaping the persistence of infrastructures as well as the ability of infrastructures to be enrolled into different sociotechnical assemblages over time. Focusing on the perspectives of engineers through processes of sociotechnical change, I argue, reveals how malleability is utilized in practice to shift the use and function of infrastructures as well as how engineers stabilize divergent meanings and conflicting politics during times of crisis.

Morris Dam took form in relation to the cycles of floods and droughts in the region and the social and political responses to them. From the Great Flood of 1862, dropping more than four times the average amount of rainfall in the region over 45 days (Engstrom, 1996), to the multi-million dollar floods striking Los Angeles between 1914 and 1938, these floods stoked public demonstrations calling for a solution to the flood control problem (Orsi, 2004). During this era, a number of upstream solutions to the flood control problem emerged, notably the construction of large dams. Much like other dams that arose during the Progressive and New Deal era, Morris Dam reflected a technocratic order to overcome the spatial and temporal limits of nature. Engineers, in particular, embodied the ideal of societal progress via the design of large technical systems and played a pivotal role in delivering the promise of more desirable futures through infrastructure. Unlike politicians and policy-makers the application of engineering expertise is typically viewed as an objective form of technocratic practice. The active participation of engineers in shaping urban metabolic functions, however, is infused with relations of authority and power that have political reverberations across time and space. The impounded waters of the San Gabriel River behind Morris Dam, for example, not only serve metabolic processes of flood control and water supply, but also represent a weaponized ecology. Once serving as a naval weapons test site and laboratory (Pool, 2003), Morris Dam’s geopolitical significance is an important part of its infrastructural life that symbolizes how dams were enrolled into Cold War politics. In contrast, with shifting environmental conditions and climate change impacts on water supply, Morris Dam’s recent retrofit aligns with new modernization efforts to build sustainability and resilience in the region (LACDPW, 2017). A focus on malleability draws attention to these sociotechnical transformations over time as well as how engineers utilize this malleability in practice to stabilize a set of politics within infrastructural relations.

Drawing on archival research and ongoing fieldwork since 2014 on water resources governance in Southern California, I examine how shifting sociotechnical imaginaries are embodied in scientific and engineering practices at Morris Dam. In the following section, I review literature on the political ecology of infrastructure. In particular, I focus on how technology and politics come together to shape the social life of infrastructure. I then examine three periods to highlight how different social, political, and economic concerns combine to repurpose infrastructural functions at Morris Dam. I conclude by reflecting on the political stakes of infrastructural transitions rooted in retrofit and anticipatory futures.

Political ecologies of infrastructure: Linking techno-politics and the sociotechnical imaginary

As Larkin (2013) notes, ‘infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter’ (329). On the one hand, infrastructures are embodiments of the flows of power and capital as well as conduits mediating and structuring material flows through cities. Forming a web of associations between social and technical components, urban infrastructures configure metabolic relationships that enable and constrain the formation of social–ecological conditions (Gandy, 2004; Newell and Cousins, 2015; Swyngedouw, 2006). On the other hand, infrastructures are more than simply a foundational system of substrates – railroads, pipes, and wires – embedded in everyday life (Star, 1999). Infrastructures are relational – they are ‘something that emerges for people in practice, connected to activities and structures’ (Star and Ruhleder, 1996: 112). Rather than taking a singular or linear form, infrastructures are situated, fragmented, and heterogeneous configurations used, maintained, repurposed, and contested in relation to different goals (Bulkeley et al., 2013; Carse, 2016; Lawhon et al., 2017). These goals can be rooted in techno-politics (Hecht, 2009; Mitchell, 2002); sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015); or different promises, desires, and expectations of the future (Appel et al., 2018; Larkin, 2013).

Broadly defined, techno-politics refers to the politically strategic use of engineering and scientific practices in the design and application of technologies (Braun and Whatmore, 2010; Hecht, 2009; Mitchell, 2002). Within this framework, infrastructures take on the material form of politics and powerful interests as much as they foreground and shape political relations and trajectories. From large technological systems that bundle together networked infrastructures (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Hughes, 2012) to small mediating technologies such as water meters and rain barrels (Furlong, 2010; Meehan, 2014; Von Schnitzler, 2016), scholars have shown how a range of hard and soft infrastructures operate as technologies of government (Agrawal, 2005; Kooy and Bakker, 2008). A primary focus is the co-production of political actions and technological and infrastructural forms. Infrastructures in this view are material embodiments of political goals and modes of power geared towards the modification of social and technical systems.

The concept of techno-politics is also similar to that of sociotechnical imaginaries in that they both draw attention to the interrelations between engineers and technical experts, infrastructures and technologies, and social and political formations. In Jasanoff’s (2015) formulation of the concept, she states that sociotechnical imaginaries represent the ‘hopes and desires of the future’, but are also enabled and constrained by past achievements, ‘whether the material infrastructures of roads, power plants, and the security state, or the normative infrastructures of constitutional principles, juridical practices, and public reason’ (22). As ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures’ (Jasanoff, 2015: 6), imaginaries are not merely ideas, plans, projects, or policies. Instead, they are capable of materially forming the world through concrete objects and institutions that perform and legitimize the world’s state experts and authorities seek to create. As a method in co-production, sociotechnical imaginaries have informed a wide range of investigations demonstrating how knowledge and representations of the world are inseparable from the norms and cultural values that produce nature and society (Jasanoff, 2004). While topically diverse, from studies on sustainable cities (Levenda et al., 2018; Tozer and Klenk, 2018) to resource politics (Baker et al., 2018; Kuchler and Bridge, 2018; Molden and Meehan, 2018), the concept points towards the mutually constitutive role of science, technology, and social order.

Sociotechnical imaginaries and techno-politics are also connected to notions of promise. As Appel et al. (2018) note ‘new infrastructures are promises made in the present about our future’ (27). Infrastructures and technologies are the material manifestation of a promise of an anticipated or imagined future (Larkin, 2018), but are also political in their ability to control populations and resources and structure differential access along class, race, or gendered lines (Anand, 2018). Harvey and Knox (2012), in their work on road construction in Peru, show how the enchantments of infrastructure hold and retain promise even as they fail to bring about imagined futures. Promises bring the infrastructures and the state into mutual constitution, but it is through everyday lived encounters with infrastructure that rearticulate possibilities through maintenance, collapse, or construction. These various relations present a paradox when articulating the hopes and dreams pinned to infrastructural development. Ruin, retrofit, and risk each present paradoxical forms in understanding infrastructure and how they simultaneously embody generation and degeneration; the past, present, and future; and the mitigation and production of risk (Howe et al., 2015).

I expand on this infrastructural scholarship in two ways. First, by focusing on the practices of scientists and engineers, I draw out the sociotechnical imaginaries shaping their activities and the types of politics they accomplish through technological development. Rather than acting as objective and apolitical actors, they are actively engaged in materially forming the technological and infrastructural futures desired by politicians and policy-makers. Drawing on the conceptual affinities between sociotechnical imaginaries and techno-politics offers, on the one hand, an analysis into how technologies are enrolled into political processes and used towards political objectives. On other hand, it connects the political to how advances in science and technology are rooted in competing hopes and desires of the future.

Second, I focus on how infrastructures shift beyond their initial metabolic functions in moments of crisis to take on new meanings and capacities. My focus is less about established accounts of how crises arise in relation to urban metabolic breakdown or infrastructural failure. Instead, my focus is on the transformational moment that arises in periods of global and local crisis that allow infrastructure to take on new significance and structure new relations across scales. Understanding the transformational moment when infrastructures assume new roles, I argue, has political implications for structuring more just and equitable infrastructural futures.

Crisis and the infrastructural life of Morris Dam

This section examines the different forms of crises that give shape to new infrastructural relations and the role of scientific and engineering practices in fulfilling state goals to resolve them. From construction to retrofit, each of the moments below highlights how Morris Dam evolved and changed over time to address different forms of crisis. Viewing infrastructures as a malleable process, I argue, pushes the analysis from the politics of how infrastructures function as metabolic conduits to the politics of how they take on new meaning and purpose in relation to shifting social and environmental conditions.

Period One: Infrastructural failure, crisis, and modernist dreams

Morris Dam needs to be situated within the broader history of urbanization, water resources development, and dam construction and disaster in California and the American West to understand its social and material context. In particular, two forms of crisis shaped the conditions around Morris Dam’s emergence. The first is what Worster (1985: 308) refers to as Leviathan ailing. Signs of fracture within the sociotechnical imaginary of the Progressive Era and New Deal, rooted in technocratic visions to impose order on nature through advances in technology and infrastructure, emerged through a series of failed projects. This perceived crisis of failure in the ability of infrastructure to deliver its promise of progress, however, only served to reinforce the Progressive and New Deal era zeal for the mastery of nature through large infrastructural and engineering feats. Greater managerial control would be exerted over the design and construction of Morris Dam.

In contrast, the other crisis was rooted in a lack of water resources to sustain visions of urban growth in the region. Engineers and planners applied their dam making expertise to recover and store waters ‘wasted out to sea’ and protect urban development from floodwaters. Their collective visions sought to overcome the temporal cycles of floods and droughts in the region through dam making. Both forms of crisis, nonetheless, show a sociotechnical imaginary rooted in overcoming the limits of nature by imposing order on the landscape.

Cracks within the sociotechnical order materialized through a series of unsuccessful projects and infrastructural failures. In Southern California, few events eclipse the collapse of the St Francis Dam on 12 March 1928, which is the second greatest disaster in California history – behind only the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906 – and the greatest American civil engineering failure of the 20th century (Rogers, 1995). Designed by William Mulholland, the influential engineer and head of what would become the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, St Francis Dam was a near duplication of Weid Canyon Dam – later renamed Mulholland Dam – and forms Hollywood Reservoir (Wilkman, 2016). St Francis Dam was part of a series of dams intended to provide additional water supplies in case of drought or vandalism to the Los Angeles Aqueduct by Owens Valley farmers, who in protest had dynamited and vandalized portions of the Los Angeles Aqueduct (Pollack, 2016).

Construction of St Francis Dam began in 1924 and shared some basic design features of other concrete gravity arch type dams built by LADWP in the era. St Francis Dam, however, lacked essential design features. The dam was assembled using 130,000 cubic yards of concrete composed of local aggregate sourced from San Francisquito Creek – the very waterway it was designed to dam (Rogers, 2013). Despite this large volume of concrete, St Francis Dam did not contain any reinforcing steel, nor did it comprise of contraction joints, drainage galleries that allow for inspection of cracks and sources of leakage, or cut-off walls to reduce water seepage under the dam (Petroski, 2003). Most glaring, nonetheless, was a lack of understanding about the underlying geology of the site and its position along a series of Pleistocene-era landslides (Rogers, 1995).

On 12 March 1928, with St Francis Dam at capacity, the dam began to show signs of stress. A concerned William Mulholland, along with his Assistant Chief Engineer Harvey Van Norman, personally examined the emerging cracks and determined them average and safe (Wilkman, 2016). About 12 hours later, around midnight, Mulholland’s inspections would be proven wrong. The dam collapsed and 38,000 acre-feet of water rushed down the canyon killing at least 432 people and leaving a path of destruction in its wake (Rogers, 2013). While tragic, the disaster highlights an emerging crisis in the sociotechnical order envisioned by water resources engineers, such as Mulholland, and what Worster (1985) describes as a ‘misplaced, dangerous confidence in its mastery, through concrete, steel, and earth, over nature’ (308–309). Embodying this worldview, Mulholland firmly responded with a ‘no’ when asked if he employed any geologists to study the dam site. The follow-up question at the inquiry went on to ask whether Mulholland considered himself an engineer. He replied:

Well, I don't claim to be, but a man learns something about rock who has drilled fifty-three miles of tunnels through these hills. I have built nineteen dams in my time; I have been consulted in the building of nineteen more. Hindsight is always better than foresight. We thought we had the bed rock when we built this dam. (Jones, 1928: 10)

This crisis would not prove an end to the sociotechnical order envisioned by engineers and politicians like Mulholland – nor the New Deal outlook that oversaw the expansion of dam building across the American West. Instead, the disaster would influence sweeping dam safety legislation. Only two days after the collapse of St Francis Dam the United States Bureau of Reclamation ordered that all of their dams undergo a safety check by a competent engineer (Rogers, 2013). In California, the state issued its first dam safety legislation, requiring all new dams be subject to the approval of the State Engineer. California also required professional engineering registration and created legislation to determine financial compensation for victims. Nationally, though, the disaster brought negative attention to the proposed Boulder Canyon Dam (Hoover) project, and the impact it would have if it too were to fail.

Dam development within the San Gabriel Canyon, however, reorganized soon after California’s new dam safety legislation went into effect. A panel led by Jack Savage, the chief design engineer of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, exercised the authority of the bill in their decision to cancel the San Gabriel Dam at The Forks. Savage and his crew were called to inspect the site of the new dam after a landslide caused by over-blasting the dam’s right abutment during excavation prevented further construction (Rogers, 2013).

The Forks Dam was not a small operation, either. If completed, it would have become the world’s tallest dam at the time. The Los Angeles Times referred to it as the ‘world’s greatest project of its kind’ (LA Times, 1926, 1927). Owned by the Los Angeles County Flood Control District, the Forks Dam would stand 500 feet high and span 2300 feet along its crest – larger than Hoover Dam, completed seven years later under the supervision of Jack Savage (Rogers, 2013).

When Savage and his panel revealed their findings on the Forks Dam, they concluded that the dam ‘cannot be constructed without menace to life and property’ (Rogers, 2013: 82). Rather than tempering a sociotechnical imaginary rooted in technological prowess as a means to improve human well-being, however, Savage and his crew would reinforce their vision and faith in large dams. In their conclusions, they recommended a rockfill dam at a site one mile downstream. In the wake of Savage’s decision, the Los Angeles County Flood Control District would go on to build two smaller dams: the San Gabriel Dam and Cogswell Dam.

As proposals for Pine Canyon Dam (Morris) came into fruition, these dams served as objects to structure legal disputes over water rights and contest further dam construction in the San Gabriel watershed. In particular, San Gabriel Valley communities dependent on the surface and groundwater of the San Gabriel River leveraged opposition. They did this primarily on two grounds. First, enrolling the same discourses that brought a halt to the Forks Dam, cities of the San Gabriel Valley contested in opposition to engineers’ and geologists’ reports that Morris Dam can be built ‘without menace to life and property’ (LA Times, 1931). Concerned municipalities noted, ‘It would be difficult to read this report without strong misgivings. Like all reports of geologists it so written and so qualified that no blame would attach to the scientific board if a disaster should occur’ (LA Times, 1931). Residents also raised similar concerns, seeing no need for multiple dams in the same water watershed and fearing Morris Dam’s situation on a fault line would inevitably lead to the same fate as St Francis Dam. At town meetings, citizens pushed claims that Morris Dam ‘has no value to the city’, that failure ‘would bankrupt the city’, and that ‘the use of such an experimental dam’ is a danger (Blakeley, 1932).

While anxieties of infrastructural failures fuelled opposition to further dam construction, their primary basis of opposition was rooted in concerns over water scarcity, access, and rights. Pasadena with a vision to be a city of 400,000 people, determined that their water supplies were overdrawn, stating that ‘local supply cannot be materially increased and an additional supply is imperative… and the City of Pasadena cannot await the arrival of Colorado River water’ (Hill et al., 1929). While the City of Pasadena utilized discourses of nature’s limits to pass bond legislation to construct the dam, downstream municipalities, already water-stressed, questioned Pasadena’s rights to the waters of the San Gabriel Canyon. Even as Pasadena received its water rights permits allowing the construction of Morris Dam, their plan continued to face legal challenges from Long Beach and other downstream municipalities.

Further complicating the dam’s use was the County Counsel’s opinion stating that the dam could not be used for anything except flood control, holding that ‘the uses of flood-control and water storage were so diverse that an act granting powers for one purpose would conceivably be in direct opposition to the other purpose’ (LA Times, 1929). The potential to store ‘wasted’ waters behind the dam proved too valuable though, and an acceptable agreement was drafted, which transferred rights to the Metropolitan Water District (MWD). The agreement among parties stated that Pasadena could continue to build the dam under the guidelines that all rights be transferred to the MWD, and when the Colorado River Aqueduct is completed, both Pasadena and MWD will release all San Gabriel water claims to downstream parties (Runyon, 1932). The remaining water captured in the reservoir would be ‘salvageable’, and Pasadena’s claims fell on the ‘unappropriated flood waters of the San Gabriel River – waters which now and forever in the past have wasted into the sea’ (Hill et al., 1929).

Amidst concerns over dam safety and conflicts over water rights, Morris Dam emerged with a set of new design features. Envisioned by Samuel B. Morris as a key infrastructural component securing the growth and well-being of Southern California citizens, his principal interest was designing a dam to withstand shocks and stresses of the natural environment. Of primary concern was the design of an earthquake resistant dam as it was constructed over a geologic fault and needed built-in features to permit its movement along the fault (Morris and Pearce, n.d.). In designing a dam with the flexibility to absorb shocks from earthquakes, attention focused on the geologic striations of the canyon. Engineers assumed that any movement would occur parallel to the striations and a joint would be needed to permit further horizontal movement along the striations in the rock (Morris and Pearce, n.d.). With these design features geared towards earthquake resistance, Morris Dam emerged as the first gravity mass concrete dam designed for physical fault offset and to use low-heat cement to reduce internal stress, widely seen as a major feat of engineering. It was also the first dam engineered for pseudo-static seismic loads and to have its dynamic properties tested. These tests and design features built resiliency to the impacts of earthquakes and other disturbances into the dam. The material properties of the dam created flexibility to ongoing social, political, and environmental changes.

Reinforcing the vision of the Progressive and New Deal era Southern California, Morris Dam’s Art Deco style and design signified the technological progress of the city and region. Upon dedication, Samuel Morris (1934) noted the dam’s role in safeguarding Pasadena’s water needs and how the project is a reflection of the ‘minds and brawn’ of the ‘men and women who have made this great project a reality’. It was Herbert Hoover (1934), however, who delivered the promise and captured the spirit of the project at its opening, noting that (see Figure 2),

Figure 1.

Map of Los Angeles Region. The map shows upstream dams and rivers flowing down towards Long Beach, California. Map by author.

Nothing can long defer sustained progress in this mighty nation of builders… this dam is much more than a material achievement; it stands as a monument to the spirit of America, where no temporary confusion or bewilderment stifles our instinctive urge to build, to improve, to hold on the paths of progress.

The ceremony was a clear demonstration of the power and technological prowess of the region to deliver on shared visions of desirable futures and overcoming crisis, which through the eyes of engineers like Hoover, Savage, and Morris, were only achievable through advances in science, engineering, and technology.

Period Two: Weaponizing the nature of infrastructure

The construction of Morris Dam occurred during the middle of the Great Depression. While this financial crisis created a host of social and environmental problems, the inter-war years also brought new concerns to national defence and security. A challenge for the Navy, as noted by Vice Admiral Wilson Brown upon taking command of the Boston Naval Yard in 1942, was merely staying manned and operated (Slichter, 1961). As the financial crisis constrained the scope of the Navy’s operations, it brought deficiencies in naval warfare to the fore. In the post-First World War years, the Navy had an urgent need to improve its anti-submarine devices and to further develop the scientific aspects of undersea warfare. The Navy’s limited ability to test torpedoes during the fiscally constrained Depression era, however, created and maintained design flaws on the Mark 13 torpedo, which made it inadequate for combat use (Foladare, 1946b). In particular, conservative calculations of the altitude and speed of release of torpedoes when dropped from aircraft left the Navy with torpedoes that changed course on their way to the target or were not strong enough to withstand high-speed aircraft drops (The Associated Press, 1948). As the United States entered the Second World War, the Navy still relied on torpedoes similar to the ones used at the end of the First World War.

At this geopolitical and technological conjuncture, the problem of developing new torpedoes was presented to scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) by Captain Samuel R. Shumaker, the Director of Research and Development Division in the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance (Foladare, 1946a). Nearby Morris Dam, already available for use by Caltech through the permission of the MWD, provided adequate and relatively isolated conditions for developing experimental facilities to test torpedoes. With work already underway in 1941 on the water entry of projectiles at Caltech, the test facility would become operational in 1943.

This new use of the dam reflects a different infrastructural engagement, one that not only uses the dam for storage and flood control but as a weapons laboratory. Under controlled conditions, studies focused on the water entry characteristics of full-scale missiles. Scientists and engineers sought to resolve the ‘strange behaviour of torpedoes and other objects entering the water from the air’ and eliminate any of the ‘guesswork of their pre-WW II predecessors’ (LA Times, 1948). More critically, the laboratory at Morris Dam sought to conquer nature through weapons development. A primary task of the scientists at Caltech was to make the US Military’s missiles compatible with the sea. Embarking on this task included a sophisticated and large-scale laboratory complex.

The experiments at the lab were an extension and application of technological rationalities embedded in military thinking (Kindervater, 2017), but it was under the controlled conditions of the experimental lab that weapons technologies were reconciled with nature. The technical vision of the scientists and engineers sought to develop a more accurate and controllable weapon, which pushed them to study the hydrodynamic effects of torpedoes at their entry, along their underwater trajectories, and other general structural aspects of the scientists described as the entry problem (Foladare, 1946a, 1946b). At the Caltech scientists’ immediate use was a pressure tank for setting up experiments (see Figure 3). At the lab, they set up a catapult for launching torpedoes into the water at various angles and speeds, as well as acoustic ranges to determine underwater trajectories and cameras for recording water entry. These experiments helped establish the mathematical basis for modern torpedo design – from their air trajectory to water entry and path. At this reduced geometric scale, the scientists would seek to solve problems of underwater ballistics and guide future weapons development. Among the many concerns of the weapons engineers were whether or not torpedoes produced bubbles that could be tracked from the sky as well as the path and trajectory of the torpedoes upon their entry into the water (Foladare, 1946a, 1946b). This quest to make missiles compatible with the sea, however, was driven by concerns that the military needed to find methods capable of combating the unforeseen weapons of the future.

Figure 2.

President Herbert Hoover speaking at the dedication of Morris Dam. Source: Photo courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 3.

Model catapult and entry cameras set up for experiments on torpedoes at the California Institute of Technology. Source: Photo JF3.7 courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology.

The weapons tests and experiments would move from Caltech labs to Morris Dam, which served as the new laboratory for torpedo development. At the dam, a ‘variable angle’ torpedo launcher – a 300 feet long, 22 feet high, and 35 feet wide, all-welded steel structure, with two tubes running through it for firing torpedoes – was constructed to shoot missiles at speeds up to 680 miles per hour into the reservoir. Underwater, listening devices and cameras would track the behaviour and misbehaviour of the projectiles as they approached their targets made of wood, sand, and fencing (Rule, 1942). Above water, an overhead camera and a sideview camera would capture the surface behaviour of the torpedoes. The ultimate aim was to generate positive values for describing the performance of torpedoes. The torpedoes, themselves, however, also served as flying laboratories, carrying various instruments, structural elements, and altered portions of the torpedo mechanism, such as pinholes (Biot, 1942). These so-called dummy torpedoes allowed the scientists to rework the dynamic constants of the torpedo and come to an ultimate conclusion on their behaviour. The scientists and engineers used their mathematical techniques to come to qualitative descriptions of what occurs at the time of torpedo entry into the water, from air to water trajectories (Biot, 1943).

The location and design of the dam, however, made it particularly amenable to weapons testing. While the torpedoes never carried explosives – they were designed to float to the surface after testing – precaution, security, and secrecy structured experimental life at Morris Dam. The remoteness of the dam, as well as its proximity to Pasadena and Caltech, helped ensure security and some element of secrecy. The design features of the dam, however, could assuage fears of rogue torpedoes. In particular, Morris Dam was designed for dynamic loading, or the sudden force applied to a structure due to an earthquake or explosion. These material characteristics of the dam helped enrol it into the growing military landscape of the US.

More critically, Morris Dam provided the domestic backdrop of American hegemony, where science and technology would serve to advance ideas of progress. In particular, their gaze focused on the potential of underwater warfare. As Chief Engineer Saylor noted,

The high-speed submarine is emerging as one of the major weapons of the future, and is the only vessel against which there is yet no adequate defence. It’s hard to detect and hard to stop. The Navy has the finest facilities in the world at Morris Dam and the knowledge we are gaining here is an important step toward combating tactics to be employed by the super-submarines of the future. (LA Times, 1948)

Indeed, weapons development continued apace at Morris Dam. As torpedoes, such as the Mark 13 became out of date, the dam would continue to be the site of ongoing weapons development. At the Morris Dam range, the Polaris missile, SUBROC (submarine rockets), ASROC (anti-submarine rockets), and Mark 46 homing torpedoes and rockets all came into development at Morris Dam (Hansen, 1965).

Morris Dam and Caltech were not the only dams or institutions of higher education to be enrolled into military efforts during and after the Second World War. Institutions from Princeton University to the University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all sought to meet the demands of national defence and the new technical and social challenges consistent with the United States emerging as a global power after the Second World War (Barnes and Farish, 2006). Hiwassee Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) sixth dam along the Tennessee River, also emerged as a site of torpedo testing and development (TVA, 2018). The language of national defence in the TVA act allowed for such uses, and similar to Morris Dam, it was chosen due to its deep reservoir and remote mountain location (Foladare, 1946b). Both Morris Dam and Hiwassee Dam, under the Bureau of Ordnance, were the proving ground for developing an arsenal that displayed a technological prowess that served to extend American interests and ideals of democracy abroad. Dams and river basin development abroad extended American hegemony through sociotechnical imaginaries of improving human well-being through technological development (Sneddon, 2015), but these dams also proved to be sites where social order could be attainable through advances in weapons technologies and the spread of democracy. This was a powerful application of dams in expanding American influence during the Cold War era, but also reflects the political and technical practices that co-produced the power of engineering and the power of state practices.

While weapons development no longer occurs at either dam, the legacies of these militarized ecologies endure in powerful ways. The dams remain, but the remnants and ruins of torpedo development last through decaying concrete structures and environmental contaminants (Adams, 2010). Arsenic, perchlorates used as propellants, and other heavy metals remain in the environs of Morris Dam (Kimitch, 2009). As was common practice during the time of weapons development at Morris Dam, these contaminants were poured directly into the ground. The chemicals now reside in the bedrock of the site, and some of the contamination cannot be removed (LADPW, 2007). While most of the contaminated soils and rocks were dug up and sent to Kettleman City hazardous materials dump, west of Bakersfield, CA, potential impacts on water quality remain (Adams, 2010). The toxic legacies of weaponization, however, have wider implications as they also reflect structures of environmental racism and environmental justice in California (Pulido, 2017; Sze et al., 2009). Kettleman City’s population is 98% Hispanic, with nearly 30% of residents living below poverty levels (US Census, 2019). A set of governmental, regulatory, and institutional practices created an uneven landscape of toxic exposure and containment, which reflect systems of power that create inequality gaps between white and non-white communities (Pulido, 2000).

Period Three: Sustainability and resilience

Among water resource challenges in California, Morris Dam embodies efforts to refashion infrastructures in the pursuit of improved water resilience in the region. Morris Dam also represents how infrastructures take on new life and are re-worked in relation to new problems, concerns, and visions of more desirable futures. The ongoing process of maintaining and modifying infrastructures, such as Morris Dam, occurs through multiple temporalities, which coalesce around different promises of sociotechnical futures. The material and representational work Morris Dam engenders in the current political, economic, and climatic conjuncture centres on efforts to build water resilience and security. While Morris Dam has long been a part of the Los Angeles County Flood Control District’s joint mission of flood risk mitigation and stormwater capture for groundwater replenishment, Morris Dam is seeing new life as concerns over water availability and crisis come into focus as a consequence of changing climatic realities. Water resources engineers, planners, and scientists are actively embracing new methods of maintaining reliable water sources and enacting the myriad visions of urban resiliency planning. Engineers operate, at this moment, as facilitators of a political aim in retrofitting existing infrastructures to build resilient futures. Far from objective and technocratic actors, their labour and visions enable the formation and adaptation of infrastructures to achieve the political aims of the state.

For many policy-makers, engineers, planners, and other decision-makers, drought brought new attention to the role of old infrastructures in addressing the water crisis and building resilience across the region. On the one hand, this attention focused on the deficiencies of networked water supply projects to deliver reliable volumes of water in the face of climate change and an evolving regulatory landscape (Cousins, 2017b). Water supplied to Los Angeles through the State Water Project and the Los Angeles Aqueduct, for example, presents reliability challenges due to climate change, environmental regulation, and municipal policy, which seek to reduce dependency on imported water supplies purchased from the MWD (LADWP, 2010). On the other hand, drought and climate change brought managerial and technocratic attention to large centralized infrastructures that promote retention, such as dams and spreading grounds, and allow large volumes of runoff to be captured and stored for water supply benefits (Cousins, 2017a).

For the engineers tasked with retrofitting the existing infrastructure, logics of efficiency permeate their visions and designs. As one engineer described their work

conservation has always been secondary [at Morris Dam]… but water is a valuable resource, and with urban development all around the [spreading] grounds [downstream of Morris Dam], we have a focus on enhancement. We need to capture more and be more efficient. Water supply is critical. (Interview, March 2018)

This latter perspective frames the current focus on Morris Dam as an infrastructure around which a more secure, reliable, and resilient water supply is imagined for the future. As key actors deeply embedded in processes of transition, engineers embody the technocratic expertise of resiliency building and governmental reform through logics of efficiency. More importantly, however, is that their actions take material form and function in ways that rework the relationship between the state, society, and the environment.

As engineers apply their methods to re-envision Morris Dam, obstacles of time present challenges that need to be overcome. The anticipation of a resilient and secure water future comes into conflict with the degrading and decaying effects of time on infrastructure. This contradiction in infrastructural time places Morris Dam at the uneasy crossroads of maintenance and modernization. In 1998, engineers from the United States Bureau of Reclamation found many deficiencies during their inspections of Morris Dam. At the dam’s inlet/outlet they identified several structural and operational concerns, including old, damaged, and inadequately sized electrical distribution equipment, and operational flaws that make the outlet valves susceptible to miss-operation, especially if exposed to high sediment flows (LADPW, 2007). As an engineer noted of the process,

the old system at Morris Dam was susceptible to sediment, and the new ones are more robust to sediments and solving this problem, along with modernizing Morris Dam, is an important function that is part of the building resilience for Los Angeles. (Interview, March 2018)

The physical interventions of engineers are opening new possibilities to secure and maintain water resources as they retrofit infrastructures that are adaptable to a changing climate.

As news outlets noted, ‘A $10.6 million modernization of Morris Dam in Los Angeles County allowed 1,500 additional acre-feet of water to be delivered annually down the San Gabriel River, to replenish aquifers’ (Mount et al., 2014). The modernization project went on to address the infrastructural deficiencies that arose over time by automating the inlet/outlet works as well as modifying it with a higher intake valve, which made the system less vulnerable to sediments. All of the improvements focused on increasing stormwater capture and delivery, which frame visions of continually recharged aquifers and sustainable water supplies across Los Angeles County. In particular, the project allowed an additional capture of 5720 AF of water for groundwater recharge and extraction in the San Gabriel River watershed. As a priority project within the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s Urban Water Management Plan, the technological modifications provide flexibility in water management (LADWP, 2010, 2015a, 2015b). Engineers and resource managers now have a greater ability to conjunctively manager reservoir discharges and groundwater recharge downstream. In particular, the vision of the engineers rested on the creation of flexibility in the coordination of water releases for water conservation with water agencies and removing operational gaps that match downstream uses. Overall, the (re) modernizing project at Morris Dam rose through the development of multiple benefits, including groundwater management and stormwater capture and storage.

At this moment of defining technical solutions to water resources challenges, old discourses emerge alongside concerns over efficiency and beneficial use. As scientists, journalists, and engineers describe the stormwater wasted out to see, they reflect William Mulholland’s plea to build dams and ‘stop the goddamned waste’ (Reisner, 1986). While historical context is different, the past and present come together over concerns of water reliability for continued growth. The urban growth made possible by William Mulholland’s water works projects brought with it an increase in impervious surfaces and a flood control system that sends much of the stormwater runoff into the ocean. This water historically recharged local groundwater basins and with increased regulatory and climatic pressures stormwater is becoming a target of future water supplies (Cousins, 2017b; LADWP, 2015a; Porse et al., 2015; Simes et al., 2016). Within this historical context, Morris Dam operates as a mediator and conduit through which stormwater is captured and retained in the reservoir or discharged downstream to spreading grounds for groundwater recharge.

With ongoing drought conditions and continuing uncertainty on the future of water in Southern California, Morris Dam is only one piece within a broader sociotechnical vision of developing sustainable and resilient water supplies. While once a threat to Los Angeles and Southern California’s urban and economic development, stormwater was impounded, channelized, and diverted. Morris Dam emerged, in part, as an object to control the ‘flood menace’, but retrofits have enrolled Morris Dam in new visions of maintaining and sustaining a modern and resilient city. Morris Dam is part of a broader set of infrastructures designed to stop ‘wasting’ stormwater runoff out to sea. Seen as ‘free liquid gold’ among a range of water resource managers, the water crisis that emerged with long-term drought developed new and rearticulated appreciations for stormwater and its ability to fulfil water quality and quantity deficiencies (Boxall, 2017).

Morris Dam, however, is only one technological piece in shaping state visions of water management. Addressing water resource challenges also entails moves to reorganize legal structures and develop new forms of environmental citizenship. Many legal frameworks have historically defined stormwater as a waste or nuisance, which came to shape the infrastructures supporting Southern California’s flood control and urban drainage system. These durable infrastructures can create limits on the ability of planners and engineers to devise new methods, but they can also be repurposed in a green and grey infrastructural matrix to achieve new water reliability goals. These green, or ecologically based infrastructures, and grey infrastructural forms, such as pipes, canals, pumps, operate in an ideological tension that supports collective visions of sustainability, resilience, and progress (Cousins, 2018; Wachsmuth and Angelo, 2018).

Alongside the (re) modernization of infrastructures, such as Morris Dam, are efforts to incentivize citizen participation in water conservation through residential improvement programmes (LADWP, 2015a). These distributed projects work alongside centralized infrastructures in a broader techno-political move to enrol citizens into programmes designed to conserve and capture increasingly larger volumes of stormwater through behavioural change. With ongoing water supply challenges, capturing and harvesting rainwater, whether through dams or household cisterns, helps conserve water supplies and build water security. These changing patterns of responsibility represent a new relationship between citizens, politics, technology, and nature in the city.

During a time of water crisis, however, infrastructure emerges again as a technological fix to the region’s recurring droughts. This mind-set of just-in-time water infrastructure supports discourses on sustainability and resilience. With roughly 10.3 million people in Los Angeles County relying upon local drinking water supplies, myriad forms of stormwater infrastructure are essential for everyday life and supporting regional visions to build water resiliency and endure ongoing water crises (Antos, 2014). As a head engineer described to me during a site visit, ‘if we didn’t upgrade the dam we would not be releasing water [for groundwater augmentation], and this project came along at the right time’ (Interview, June 2015). These temporal concerns of water supply and availability are not simply about engineers working with an urgency to address climate change impacts but in physically reconfiguring the flows of water in support of fulfilling the aims of the central government. With the modernization of Morris Dam coming ‘just-in-time’, the county now has the ability to replenish enough water to serve roughly half-a-million households (McNary, 2017).

Within the infrastructural life-cycle of development, maintenance, decay, and renewal, what stands out about Morris Dam is its ability to persist and be flexible in its ability to achieve multiple uses over time. As a county official told me during a visit to Morris Dam, ‘unlike in other places, we aren’t taking our dams down. We are actually using them. They are very, very valuable to water resource management in this area’ (Interview, March 2018). While the era of big dam building in the United States is mostly over, and as dams are coming down across the United States in increasing numbers, Morris Dam signals an uneven infrastructural movement of renewal and decommissioning (Magilligan et al., 2017; O’Connor et al., 2015). With large dam construction increasing in many parts of the world (Zarfl et al., 2014), and the lure of small-hydropower projects (Kelly-Richards et al., 2017), Morris Dam’s modernization shows how water crises re-centre durable infrastructures as objects mediating the resource–state nexus.

Conclusion

In this paper, I examined the multiple temporalities of infrastructure and how malleability is a key feature enabling infrastructures to persist through sociotechnical transformations across time. I suggested that openness and flexibility to changing sociotechnical imaginaries define these types of infrastructures, as they take on new meanings and forms in relation to shifting political, economic, and environmental conditions. Morris Dam provided an example of how infrastructures embody a plurality of roles and take on different trajectories during their social and material life. In particular, a focus on engineers revealed how malleability is harnessed in practice to stabilize new political concerns that arise in moments of crisis and materialize these concerns into new infrastructural forms and functions. These types of social and material interrelationships create new activities and operations that extend beyond an infrastructure’s original design purposes, whether as metabolic conduits or some other type of support structure.

Infrastructures can be defined by their capacities to express heterogeneous configurations of form, function, and meaning. Morris Dam emerged as part of a more extensive process of technoscientific state formation in California, which centred on water infrastructure (Carroll, 2012), but it is more than a completed project in the pursuit of securing water resources and establishing flood control for a growing region. On the one hand, the same technical and natural features that made Morris Dam an ideal flood control and water supply infrastructure also made it an ideal infrastructure for weapons development. While I did not claim that Morris Dam represents a form of weaponized nature (Bigger and Neimark, 2017; Kosek, 2010), it is a militarized ecology where the technical and environmental conditions of the dam facilitated the development of weapons. This configuration of science, nature, and weapons at Morris Dam produced new and unintended sociotechnical configurations rooted in achieving desirable futures through advances in science and technology.

On the other hand, the original features of the dam also produced constraints on the future functionality of the dam. The eroding effects of time on infrastructure, as well as the build-up of sediments, produced new concerns at the dam as drought conditions lingered in the region. Through retrofits and modernization, the dam has taken on new forms that seek to build more sustainable and resilient futures. Drawing attention to the spatio-temporal trajectories of infrastructure, however, allows for a processual view of how infrastructures take on new forms of significance and sociality, some of which may exceed the designs and intentions of their original planners.

Ultimately, what is at stake here is understanding how different forms of power and sociality emerge alongside infrastructure. Power operates through different imaginaries that animate the work of scientists and engineers as well as stabilized practices, such as standards, rules, and regulations, that become institutionalized (Björkman, 2018; Carse and Lewis, 2016; Picon, 2018). Power is also the materialization of techno-political matters. The new social and material relations afforded by infrastructure shape how people gain access to resources and services. With a rise in urban governance structures to build smart and resilient cities capable of anticipating unknown risks into the future (Derickson, 2017), infrastructural politics will continue to be at the centre of urban life. The task will be to pursue alternative forms of infrastructural politics that allow diverse, equitable, and just approaches to transform the systems structuring daily life.

Finally, infrastructure is at the centre of a range of policy and academic discourses emerging around building resiliency and adapting to climate change impacts, and this case offers important lessons in how society might respond to those challenges. With climate change posing a host of threats to the planetary system, the final question is what type of sociotechnical imaginaries do discourses of resiliency bring to light? What impact will they have on building climate justice? From proposed sea walls to smart technologies, new types of infrastructure have the ability to mitigate climate change impacts but can also exacerbate or create new zones of vulnerability. These infrastructures could enable processes that weaponize vulnerability (Thomas and Warner, 2019) or be enrolled in to other zones of security. A focus on malleable infrastructures, I suggest, offers ways to understand how infrastructures persist over time and through crisis as well as how engineers utilize malleability to stabilize conflicting political goals and aims.

Highlights

Infrastructures are embodiments of multiple sociotechnical imaginaries and trajectories.

Viewing infrastructures as a malleable process pushes analysis from the politics of how infrastructures function as metabolic conduits to the politics of how they take on new meaning and purpose.

Infrastructures are techno-political matters, which include the materiality of technological objects and the socio-political affairs they enable and constrain.

Infrastructures can take on local and global significance as new social and environmental relations form around them.

Different forms of crisis enrol old infrastructures into new sociotechnical imaginaries through processes of retrofit.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the library staff at Caltech and The Huntington Library for their assistance in researching this project. I also want to thank the Los Angeles County Flood Control District for taking me on a tour of some of their facilities. Thanks to the reviewers who offered incisive feedback. The manuscript is for the better.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This manuscript was supported by the Trent R. Dames Fellowship in the History of Civil Engineering at The Huntington Library and the National Science Foundation No. 1536377. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

ORCID iD

Joshua J Cousins

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