Posted on 09/12/2004 12:44:34 PM PDT by farmfriend
Other view: SF: Proceed with 'extreme caution' at Hetch Hetchy
By Susan Leal -- Special To The Bee
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, September 12, 2004
More than 2.4 million residents of the San Francisco Bay Area drink some of the highest quality water in the nation, delivered 160 miles by an engineering marvel of pipes and aqueducts from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park. Each spring, the melting Sierra snowpack and pristine headwaters of the Tuolumne River run strong, filling the valley to provide year-round drinking water for the people of the Bay Area, clean hydroelectric power for several counties and irrigation water for the Central Valley's Turlock and Modesto Irrigation Districts.
Like many cities in the West - Los Angeles, Las Vegas and others - the federal government has given the Bay Area access to protected public lands to ensure a reliable drinking water supply through wet years and dry. San Francisco's rights to Hetch Hetchy Valley were granted under the Raker Act, passed by Congress in 1913, following many hours of debate and a national public dialogue.
But from 1913 to today, there have been some who continue to weigh the loss of the valley against the public benefits of supplying reliable, high quality drinking water for the Bay Area, irrigation water for the Central Valley and clean hydropower for San Francisco. A recent thesis by a University of California, Davis, graduate student and an upcoming study by an environmental organization have again raised the question of whether the Bay Area could theoretically receive an equally safe and reliable supply of drinking water from other sources - namely the New Don Pedro Reservoir - without Hetch Hetchy.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
I'm not an environmentalist, and I'm torn on this issue. It seems like a less beautiful part of the state could be used, but I'm not qualified to make that answer.
Supposedly, Hetch Hetchy was as equally beautiful as the Yosemite Valley.
Damming Hetch Hetchy was a bad decision. Time to reverse that bad decision. Anyway, it's not like land use regs on the penninsula could get any worse.
I visited Cabo San Lucas last month and was concerned about drinking water.
They had no centralized purification/water source. Each hotel and business establishment had their own desalinization equipment which they used to convert sea water to drinking water.
The technology is such that they can't build a single unit large enough to supply a town. But they can outfit the town with enough small units to supply the individuals.
With the way CA is growing and the inevitable shortages coming, I think this is inevitable.
In fact, if I had the operating capital, I'd open just such a business in southern Cal.
What you rarely see mentioned is that before they built Hetch Hetchy, the environmentalists of the day wanted them to use lake Tahoe as it was a dead lake from being clear cut. Go figure!
You have no clue what you are talking about.
Drain the water, and Hetch Hetchy will be a blank, barren, mud-covered, lifeless, empty desert taht woould require 100 years to becoem green again.
And, until it gets covered, it will be spewing eroded mud in gushes down teh Touleme River, killing a lot (most) of the life in the stream.
A concrete parking lot would cleaner now.
BTTT!!!!!!!
On the other hand, the mud is an exceedingly rich source of nutrients. It would look ugly for perhaps the first five years, after which the valley would be a lush Eden.
All those many years ago, the Sierra Club was originally formed to oppose the reservoir at Hetch Hetchy. During the Reagan administation, a pln was floated to replace the dam with a much larger dam at the base of the mountains, allowing the Hetch Hetchy valley to be restored. Guess what: the Sierra Club shot the plan down.
There is a lot more to it than that. I'll see if I can find the info I read on dam removal.
>>In fact, if I had the operating capital, I'd open just such a business in southern Cal.<<
Do you speak Spanish?
Donde esta el bano, por favor?
That's about it.
Great news! The tree hugging liberal tear the dam down. The economy in the Bay Area will tank and millions will be tossed out of work and have to leave California. Those are mostly "blue" voters that belong in New York, New Jersey, and Mass.
Look under section entitled "Destruction and transportation and disposal of several millions of tons of concrete, rock, and steel without causing environmental damage, wasting energy destroying concrete and moving it, and without creating an ugly mess in a different spot where you dump the waste."
100 year is a blink of the eye. Hetch Hetchy is one of God's masterpieces.
I have nothing against large civil engineering projects. But one would not turn Half Dome into a granite quarry.
This so-called plan has been floating around for years, promulgated by know-nothing lefties without any regard for real world problems.
Hetch-Hetchy is a corner stone of the Northern California economy. You may not like the politics of the area but there is still a public obligation to provide the basic infrastructure of civilization.
Who knows, we may go Bush this year...
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