Switcheroo? The story's protagonist, Nick Oliver had ventured into a bookstore, a converted two-story frame house. The bookstore specialized in local history, and he’d spent hours browsing through the rows of freestanding shelves on both floors jammed with old books.
In one corner, he’d come across an account of converting the nearby Crystal Springs Lake into a reservoir for the dam at Hetch Hetchy in the High Sierras. The account had piqued Nick’s interest because of his assignment at the Timely Information Plan. He had never actually seen the dam or the reservoir until he’d paged through the account in the bookstore. The black and white photographs that detailed the system’s
construction fascinated him. He knew the reservoir was near and reminded himself to visit it the next time he was in the vicinity. The two-hundred mile aqueduct system was nearly a century old and had fallen into disrepair.
A federal law enacted in 1850 established the Yosemite National park. Both the Hetch Hetchy and Yosemite valleys were within the park boundaries and both looked nearly identical. They possessed similar waterfalls, rock formations, and vegetation, as well as similar elevation and orientation along the flank of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Known as the twin of the famous Yosemite Valley, the Hetch Hetchy Valley is about three miles long and half a mile wide, smaller than Yosemite Valley.
In the early 1900s, the City of San Francisco petitioned to dam the Hetch Hetchy gorge at the stem of the Tuolumne River. President Theodore Roosevelt thwarted the plan as “not in keeping with the public interest.” Naturalist John Muir and Sierra Club members continued the fight to preserve the valley.
But in 1913, President Wilson signed a law that allowed the City of San Francisco to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley for a reservoir. The result was the valley was flooded and the grandeur of the once glorious, pristine wild land was lost.
Snowmelt primarily supplies the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and provides drinking water that is among the purest in the world. It travels unfiltered through the 160-mile-long water aqueduct system, which stretches from the mountains of the Sierra to the Bay Area. Using a complex series of tunnels and pipelines, it is almost entirely gravity fed. The aging system now requires a complete overhaul, and a multi-billion-dollar program is in place to repair, replace, and seismically upgrade the system.
However, there is an alternative to the reservoir in the dammed up Hetch Hetchy Valley: divert the Tuolumne River downstream outside the Yosemite National Park. Then connecting it to the existing aqueduct system, the water can be stored in other existing reservoirs. This itself will nearly make up for the loss of storage at Hetch Hetchy. In fact, according to one report, “San Francisco paid for half the cost of the nearby Don Pedro Reservoir’s construction in exchange for the right to ‘bank’ up to 740,000 acre-feet of water in Don Pedro. (That’s more than twice the amount of water Hetch Hetchy Reservoir can hold.) The water is not currently diverted directly from Don Pedro into San Francisco’s pipelines … but as long as there is water in the bank, San Francisco is allowed to divert the Tuolumne River’s flow.”
Thus, restoring the Hetch Hetchy Valley will not reduce the Bay Area’s water supply, but would restore the magnificent grandeur of Hetch Hetchy Valley.
See video of Tueeulala Falls in Hetch Hetchy Valley that rival those of its sister valley in Yosemite
Learn more about the efforts to restore Hetch Hetchy.
