… More than a century ago, agents secretly working for Los Angeles posed as farmers and ranchers as they bought land and water rights across the Owens Valley. Their scheme laid the groundwork for the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which in 1913 began sending the valley’s water to the growing city 233 miles away. Residents were so enraged in the 1920s that some carried out a series of attacks on the aqueduct, blasting it with dynamite. But there was also one major nonviolent protest, an act of civil disobedience 100 years ago that is being commemorated this weekend with a series of free community events in Lone Pine. In that defiant act of resistance on Nov. 16, 1924, a group of about 70 unarmed men took over an aqueduct spillway and control gates north of Lone Pine and began releasing all the water back into the dry channel of the Owens River. That act, called the Alabama Gates occupation, grew as more than 700 residents of all ages came to celebrate the takeover during four days of festivities, bringing food and barbecuing as the protest became a community picnic.