That's a lot of water

As you drive on Interstate 5 between Downey and the San Francisco area, you follow the California aqueduct system for a good part of the way. The Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct is a system of canals, tunnels, and pipes that carries water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains in northern and central California to southern California.

About even with San Francisco, the aqueduct divides into three branches. The I5 follows two of the branches (the east branch and the west branch) for about 250 miles. At first glance, it doesn't seem like that much water. But the average depth is 30 feet, and the width is about 100 feet. The aqueducts supply water for 25 million Californians and 750,000 acres of irrigated farmland.