Owned by San Francisco, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park provides water to nearly 3 million people in 29 cities across the San Francisco Bay Area. The water, provided by snowmelt via the Tuolumne River, does not require filtration.
Stored in Hetch Hetchy Reservoir behind O’Shaughnessy Dam, the water is delivered by a gravity based system and aqueduct to the Bay Area.
Hetch Hetchy has generated controversy since it was first proposed as a source of water following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Congress also had to approve the project because it was located in a national park. John Muir and the Sierra Club unsuccessfully fought the reservoir’s establishment since it required flooding a scenic mountain valley. After its construction in the 1920s, various groups have lobbied to restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley to its natural state.
News this week that a Bay Area non-profit’s dream of draining the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir got a welcome boost in the courts hit readers like a stick to a hornet’s nest. They loved the news. They hated the news. They hated the people who loved the news.
The battle to drain the reservoir in Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley reignited Wednesday as critics of the historic dam told a panel of judges in Fresno that their legal case to raze it should proceed, despite an earlier decision to dismiss the suit.
Two years after losing in court and six years after being rejected by voters, a Berkeley environmental group is continuing its long-running battle to drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, a linchpin of the water supply for 2.6 million Bay Area residents from San Francisco to San Jose to southern Alameda County. … The group will pursue its appeal Wednesday morning in the Fifth District Court of Appeal in Fresno.
Water bills in San Francisco are set to rise steadily over the next four years, after the approval of a rate schedule by the city’s Public Utilities Commission. … In addition to funding the commission’s regular operations, the rate increases will pay for a series of ambitious infrastructure upgrades to the city’s sewer system and vast Hetch Hetchy network that sends drinking water to 2.7 million Bay Area residents.
For the past five years, construction workers building a new 220-foot-high dam in the remote canyons east of Milpitas and Fremont have been slowly discovering a long-ago, not-quite-tropical world of buried treasures — from giant shark teeth to whale skulls to pieces of ancient palm trees. Now the huge haul of fossils beneath the Calaveras Reservoir is heading for a permanent new home at UC Berkeley.
The Bay Area’s deeply unequal cities, home to mansions and shacks alike, are linked by one thing: thirst. Banding together, the region’s water agencies on Tuesday unveiled the latest upgrades to a vast network that connects six million people and provides mutual aid in a crisis, such as an earthquake or severe drought.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife is praising its Moccasin Creek Hatchery workers after they saved nearly a quarter of the hatchery’s trout when water from a nearby dam flooded the facility.
San Francisco officials on Friday were still trying to figure out why one of their dams in the Sierra foothills was driven to the edge of failure a day earlier, but engineering experts were quick to suspect errors in management.
Heavy rain in the Sierra foothills pushed a small dam within San Francisco’s Hetch Hetchy water system to the brink of failure Thursday, sending a brief scare through the rural region where roads were closed and a few dozen residents were forced to evacuate.
The Chronicle archives overflow with photos documenting the downstream journey of Hetch Hetchy’s water — an engineering marvel that feeds power stations and fills reservoirs. So here’s a follow-up to our previous column on O’Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch Hetchy Valley.
It’s an environmental conflict that has been coursing through California for more than a century: the unrelenting thirst of San Francisco versus the pristine beauty of nature. After years of debate, O’Shaughnessy Dam opened in 1923, holding back the Tuolumne River and flooding Hetch Hetch Valley, a Sierra gem compared in its grandeur to nearby Yosemite Valley.
San Franciscans take pride in drinking pristine water from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which they treasure as among the purest in the nation. So a recent move by the Public Utilities Commission to introduce groundwater gradually into the city’s drinking supply prompted anxiety and suspicion.
San Francisco’s famously pure High Sierra water is about to be served with a twist. Starting next month, city water officials will begin adding local groundwater to the Yosemite supplies that have satiated the area’s thirst since the 1930s and made the clean, crisp water here the envy of the nation.
Early 20th century visitors to Hetch Hetchy Valley, a few miles north of Yosemite Valley, saw a rich meadowland and green oak groves, with the clear Tuolumne River winding through them, embraced by towering granite walls. It’s a landscape no one has seen since 1923, when the valley was drowned by Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the main water supply for San Francisco, 180 miles west.
In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Raker Act, which allowed for the building of the O’Shaughnessy Dam to supply earthquake-stricken San Francisco with water – at the expense of an integral part of one of the world’s most beautiful national parks.
A judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit seeking to force the city of San Francisco to drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, a key part of the water system for 2.6 million residents of Bay Area cities stretching from Hayward to San Jose to San Francisco.
In a significant step for the largest reservoir project in the Bay Area in 20 years, workers have finished building the spillway — a massive concrete channel as wide as eight lanes of freeway and a quarter mile long — at Calaveras Dam near the Alameda-Santa Clara county line.
State water officials not only told more Central Valley farmers Friday that they need to stop drawing water from low-flowing rivers and creeks — but they tossed the city of San Francisco onto the list as well.
Four years into a drought that has left many cities and farms desperate for water, the vast Sierra-fed water system that serves San Francisco and much of the Bay Area is in relatively good shape — and should get the region through the dry months ahead, officials said Tuesday.
The health, safety and economic well-being of 1.7 million residents and 30,000 businesses would be threatened if Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park is drained, says a San Francisco water agency in reaction to a new lawsuit over the reservoir.
Spurned at the ballot box three years ago and facing an even more uphill battle now because of California’s historic drought, an environmental group has filed a lawsuit attempting to drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, a linchpin of the water supply for 2.6 million Bay Area residents from San Francisco to San Jose to southern Alameda County.
San Francisco is unreasonably monopolizing spectacular Hetch Hetchy Valley by using it as a 117-billion-gallon reservoir, says a new lawsuit in a decades-old fight to restore the Yosemite National Park landmark.
In a tasting that could have evoked the joie de vivre of a Napa Valley showroom if it weren’t for the stiff office chairs at the water department and the inherent blandness of the fare, five Chronicle food writers — amid boozy gurgles and talk of soft finishes — were introduced to what will soon be San Francisco’s new tap water.
This week, the $288 million tunnel begins carrying the Bay Area’s water supply from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park to the Peninsula, bolstering the dependability of the region’s water system.
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Owned by San Francisco, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park provides water via water districts and private utilities to nearly 3 million people in 29 cities across the San Francisco Bay Area.
Due to its high altitude location and water supplied by snowmelt, water from the reservoir (provided by the Tuolumne River) does not require filtration. Stored in Hetch Hetchy Reservoir behind O’Shaughnessy Dam, the water is delivered by a gravity based system and aqueduct to the Bay Area.
