Where San Francisco Got Its Water

Hetch Hetchy Valley From Road, by Albert Bierstadt

From the beginning, San Francisco saw itself as the pre-eminent city on the country's West Coast.  It had a natural seaport that allowed ocean shipping, big banks that funded development and a seemingly never-ending influx of people that kickeds into gear with the Gold Rush of 1849 and just kept going.

Between 1860 and 1910 the city's population grew from 57,000 to 417,000.

Also between those years, in 1906, San Francisco had a big earthquake that led to an even bigger fire. When it was over, local citizens realized they needed a more secure water source.

They found it 170 miles east, in Yosemite National Park.  There were two big valleys in the park, Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy, and the latter looked like a good prospect for a dam.  It was narrow and surrounded almost completely by rock walls.  The Tuolumne River that ran through the bottom of the valley was fed annually by snowmelt.

The city went to Congress to get authorization for a dam in the park, over the strong objections of John Muir, the famed preservationist and the founder of the Sierra Club, which is still the most prominent American conservation group.

Muir penned a passionate plea to keep the park as it was. "The proponents of the dam scheme bring forward a lot of bad arguments to prove that the only righteous thing to do with the people's parks is to destroy them bit by bit as they are able,"  he wrote.  He called the national parks "nature's sublime wonderlands."  He argued that "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread."  He called the dam's promoters "temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism."

Muir's arguments did not carry the day.  Congress voted to allow the dam construction in 1913, and President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill.  It must have been a controversial act; the Senate vote was 43 in favor, 25 against and 29 abstaining.  Reaction against the decision is believed by some to have launched the national conservation movement.

The dam was built, as you can see below.

O'Shaughnessy Dam

Today, water from Hetch Hetchy and the reservoirs behind a series of downriver dams provide water and electricity to 2.6 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 2012, 99 years after Congress authorized the dam, environmentalists made another run against it. They collected signatures and put on the San Francisco ballot a measure to allocate $8 million for a study about breaching the dam and letting the water flow to the lower dams, which had long since provided most of the Bay Area's water.

The supporters of the measure, called Proposition F, believed that draining the reservoir would allow the valley to return to its natural state (most of the dam would remain as a monument to its builders) and would improve habitat in the ever-fragile downstream Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta.

Sen. Diane Feinstein, who had opposed a Congressional allocation for the same purpose, was against it.  So were most other Bay Area politicians. Interestingly, the Sierra Club, which was founded by dam opponent John Muir, took no position.

Opponents raised several issues -- 1) water from the lower dams would have to be filtered for public use, 2) lost hydroelectric power would be replaced by fossil fuel generation and 3) a revived Hetch Hetchy Valley would only attract more icky tourists, the way Yosemite does.

In any event, San Franciscans decided they liked their water the way it was.  They voted to keep the dam by a margin of more than 3 to 1.