San Francisco's water ways
The city is not doing enough to meet rules that allow it to use water from Hetch Hetchy.
Los Angeles Times
01/15/2012
The way San Francisco takes advantage of its bountiful water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir would make John Muir weep. The iconic naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club fought mightily to prevent the damming of one of the most beautiful valleys in Yosemite National Park nearly 100 years ago, but lost. And there are reasons to think that the city that benefits from this extraordinary federal largesse isn't abiding by one of the few restrictions placed on its water use.
The 1913 federal law that gave San Francisco its special deal also made it clear that the city was to take no more Hetch Hetchy water than it needed to "for its beneficial use for domestic and other municipal purposes." It was to continue using its own local resources of water, supplementing that as necessary with the water from Yosemite.
But the city uses almost none of its own groundwater anymore. It does little to harvest rainwater, and its water reclamation efforts are minuscule.
Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Gold River) is asking Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to investigate whether San Francisco is breaking its agreement and the law. And though the underlying motivation for this request isn't really to make San Francisco a better water citizen, the Interior Department should investigate anyway.
Lungren is an advocate of dismantling O'Shaughnessy Dam and restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley to its original state — what Muir described as "a grand landscape garden, one of nature's rarest and most precious mountain temples." Certainly it's true that the dam should never have been built; anyone who suggested damming a gemlike area of a national park these days would be treated much like a hunter setting out to kill California condors — which was also done back in the early 1900s.
