DWP Sulfate Road Facility, California

The main complex for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP)'s dust mitigation project at Owens Lake is this office and engineering complex next to the lakebed south of Keeler. The DWP has spent more than a billion dollars on the lakebed, developing, installing, and maintaining systems covering around 50 square miles, intended to reduce the dust that blows off the surface of the lake. The dust started blowing off the lakebed when the lake dried up after the Los Angeles Aqueduct, finished in 1913, captured the water that used to flow into the lake. In the 1990s, the DWP was finally compelled by lawsuits to develop methods for reducing the dust, which was so bad by then that the lake was one of the largest point sources of particulate air pollution in the nation.