A word from a Pulitzer Prize winner on Hetch Hetchy
We've had a couple of phone calls, a few e-mails and some comments on the blog item about restoring Hetch Hetchy, San Francisco's reservoir in Yosemite National Park.
Folks wanted to know how San Francisco could replace the water supply if the reservoir was emptied. And they wanted confirmation from another source that the Bay Area really was resisting any credible ideas.
I thought we should quote an editorial from our sister newspaper, The Sacramento Bee. Bee editorial writer Tom Philp, who has since left the newspaper, won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize for his series of editorials on restoring Hetch Hetchy.
He talks about an idea for replacing the city's water and addresses San Francisco's reluctance to explore the idea.
Here's an excerpt from a later editorial he wrote:
We were intrigued by the possibility of marrying two agendas -- the Bay Area's pressing need to upgrade and expand its water system and the public's insatiable appetite for visiting beautiful Yosemite valleys. So now the San Francisco Public Utilties Commission doesn't like me very much.
Without going into all the technical details, the basic proposal is to eventually drain the reservoir by punching a hole through the dam, once a bigger, better water storage system is in place outside the national park. Replace the lost storage - and then some - with a reservoir that San Francisco already was contemplating for the Bay Area: Calaveras. Build another pipe (just as San Francisco proposes) to the Sierra so that 100 million gallons more Sierra water can move per day into reservoirs when the water's available.
That's enough new storage and new conveyance in the Hetch Hetchy system to raise some legitimate questions about the future of that medium-sized reservoir in the national park. Technically speaking, this idea passes the back-of-the-napkin test. (Hetch Hetchy's is just one of nine reservoirs in the Bay Area's system, by the way.) If this weren't technically intriguing, some much smarter folks inside the California Resources Agency and its Department of Water Resources wouldn't be examing it.
This very initial study phase is normally a safe harbor for both proponents and opponents of any given idea, but in this case, even the prospect of a serious study seems to be rocking San Francisco's boat.
That's why I touched on the idea of a lawsuit to force some action. It's the model that has succeeded in other situations, such as Mono Lake and the San Joaquin River.
Comments:
Let Nancy, Barbara and Diane dig a reservoir for their precious Socialist Capitol.
Posted by: mikebp at October 16, 2009 8:06 PM
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