A key difference between restoring Hetch Hetchy and restoring the Bay Delta is the effect on water supply. Restoring Hetch Hetchy means relocating the reservoir but need not affect supply. Restoring the Bay Delta requires water to flow through the estuary so it cannot be used on cities and farms.
On March 29, the California Department of Natural Resources announced a landmark agreement to balance the water needs of cities and farms with those of the fish and wildlife (especially salmon) that rely on the Bay-Delta estuary and the rivers that feed it.
It is a big deal.
TheMemorandum of Understanding, signed by State officials and a plethora of water agencies, is a voluntary agreement intended to replace the resolution to update the Bay-Delta Plan which the State Water Board authorized in December 2018.
Not everyone is content with the voluntary agreement. Environmental and fishing groups were not included in the negotiations, and many believe the plan does not provide the amount of water that fish need. And while some water agencies signed on, others did not – including the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and other agencies who reply on water diverted from the Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Merced Rivers.
The voluntary agreement does not include as much additional flow for fish as the State Board’s 2018 resolution. The voluntary agreement does, however, include measures to improve riverine habitat (floodplains, spawning gravels etc.) that were absent in the State Board’s resolution (by law, the State Board is only authorized to regulate water flows).
So, the water agencies who signed the agreement have generally agreed to its effect on their supplies, whereas the agencies who have not signed are generally unhappy with how much water they may need to give up. Many environmental and fishing groups contend there will not be enough water to restore populations of native fish.
Notably absent from the officials signing the Memorandum of Understanding are representatives of San Francisco or the irrigation districts who use water from the Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Merced Rivers. Environmental and fishing groups were also not represented.
Governor Newsom praised that plan, calling it a rejection of “old binaries”. Jared Blumenfeld, California’s environmental protection secretary said it would “move us away from ‘water wars’.” Wade Crowfoot, California’s natural resources secretary, added that voluntary agreements “hold promise to improve environmental conditions more quickly and holistically than regulatory requirements.”
Crowfoot’s point is well taken. The plan is likely to move forward, whereas implementing the State Board’s resolution would have resulted in piles of lawsuits and may have been delayed for many years.
Still, there will be lawsuits. For many, water policy in the Central Valley is a zero sum game – supplies are either diverted to cities and farms or allowed to flow naturally through the Bay-Delta estuary for environmental benefit. It is an either-or situation. Advocates of the two sides have been battling for decades and are not likely to stop now or anytime soon.
Restoring Hetch Hetchy is different.
Restore Hetch Hetchy has always insisted that San Francisco be kept whole with respect to its water supply. We urge San Francisco to pursue system improvements so Hetch Hetchy Reservoir can be relocated without any loss of water supply or electric power production.
Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite Valley’s lost twin, can then be returned to its natural splendor; a majestic glacial-carved valley with towering cliffs and waterfalls where river and wildlife run free. Hetch Hetchy can be a new kind of national park, with limited development, an improved visitor experience, shared stewardship with native peoples, and permanent protection of its natural and cultural heritage for future generations.
The Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation is marching for federal recognition on March 5 in Mariposa.
It’s essential that all communities are welcome when Hetch Hetchy Valley is restored to its natural splendor. Restore Hetch Hetchy believes that it is especially important to honor the indigenous people and their descendants who lived in Yosemite prior to the arrival of European Americans and the creation of the National Park.
There are seven “traditionally associated tribes” presently engaged with activities in Yosemite. One of these, the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation is at a critical moment in its 40-year campaign to be formally acknowledged as a tribe by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (The Mono Lake Kutzadika’a tribe is also petitioning for federal acknowledgment.)
Restore Hetch Hetchy supports federal acknowledgment for both tribes – see our letter to the Assistant Secretary of Interior regarding the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation. For more information, visit the tribe’s website.
Please take a few minutes to watch the excellent Miwuk documentary below. It includes both hard truths and good stories. You’ll also learn about some of Yosemite’s original inhabitants who, while they may no longer live inside Yosemite, “are still around”.
Last week, National Park Diaries published “How San Francisco Stole Hetch Hetchy” on YouTube. The story may be known to most of us, but author/historian Cameron Sabin provides several interesting perspectives, including how the progressive and conservation movements coincided at the beginning of the 20th century just at the 1906 earthquake and fire devastated San Francisco.
“How San Francisco Stole Hetch Hetchy” is the latest product from National Park Diaries – all available on YouTube.
Whether it is fair to say that San Francisco “stole” Hetch Hetchy is open to debate. The City did convince Congress to pass and President Wilson to sign the Raker Act, permitting Hetch Hetchy to be dammed and flooded. So, in a sense, saying San Francisco “stole” Hetch Hetchy is unwarranted hyperbole.
On the other hand, ignoring proverbial warnings about not watching how law or sausage is made, there is a lot not to like about the way the Raker Act was passed.
Let’s first note that a deal was made for Woodrow Wilson to appoint Franklin Lane, San Francisco’s former City Attorney, as his Secretary of Interior. Also, while Interior had directed the Army Board of Engineers to review the need for the dam, the Board did not have resources of their own to investigate and relied wholly on San Francisco’s Freeman Report. And it is worth pointing out that San Francisco Examiner Publisher William Randolph Hearst was successfully sued for libel by engineer Taggart Aston, after Aston had claimed other water projects would be superior (the ruling in the libel case came three years after the Raker Act was passed). Finally, as our Keeping Promises report explains, San Francisco’s commitments for visitor access and recreation in the Hetch Hetchy have never been realized.
While history can be intriguing, Restore Hetch Hetchy is more interested in the future. San Francisco and its Bay Area customers surely need and deserve a reliable water supply. And we all deserve Hetch Hetchy to be restored and Yosemite made whole. Our campaign is dedicated to accomplishing both these things.
Don Pedro Reservoir, downstream on the Tuolumne River, holds 6 times as much water as Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. Don Pedro is operated by the Turlock and Modesto Irrigation Districts, but 1/3 of its volume is dedicated to a water supply bank for San Francisco.
Restore Hetch Hetchy is not anti-dam. Dams are essential, especially in places like California where precipitation is seasonal and the threat of multi-year drought is omnipresent. But in many cases, the environmental and recreational benefits of a river valley outweigh any water supply or hydropower benefits a dam might provide – especially when other water supply and power options are available.
The O’Shaughnessy Dam, creating the reservoir that has inundated Hetch Hetchy Valley is arguably the most egregiously inappropriate dam in the United States (the Glen Canyon crowd might disagree.)
Note that Hetch Hetchy Reservoir accounts for only about 1/8 of the surface storage on the Tuolumne River. Re-operating other reservoirs (Don Pedro, Cherry and Eleanor), along with investment in groundwater banking in Stanislaus County could keep all communities whole with respect to water supply. Barriers to restoration include cooperation (San Francisco has tenuous relations with farmers in the area and their representatives at the Turlock and Modesto Irrigation Districts), emotion (collectively, San Francisco seems to feel entitled) and money (hopefully the easy part when we slice this Gordian knot).
Semitropic’s total storage of 1,650,000 acre-feet is more than 4 times the size of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.
California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (2014) is critical legislation, especially for Central Valley communities, that will inflict significant short term pain but keep farming viable for centuries to come. While the Act does too little to encourage investments from remote cities, the success of places like the Semitropic Water Storage District can and should be copied in many area throughout the state.
The Modesto Bee just posted a nice Editorial Opinion, titled Forget new dams. A healthy aquifer is better for family farms and the environment. In conclusion, author Daniel Maner queries, “The next time you hear that our water problems can be solved by building more dams, ask yourself: Wouldn’t it be cheaper and less disruptive to the environment if we took stronger steps to prevent our aquifers from being drained, and use excess water to refill them instead of putting it in a new dam?
Maner is correct. In almost all cases, groundwater development is cheaper that building new dams. This is especially true because, as we explain in Hetch Hetchy and California Water Supply, Updated August 2018), “most of California’s major rivers are either already dammed, protected by law, or too remote to be economically developed.” Indeed, the vast majority of water supply development over the past several decades has been below, not above, ground.
Still, some additional reservoir development in California may make sense. We are intrigued, in fact by San Francisco’s proposal to “someday” enlarge Calaveras Reservoir by an amount almost equal to the size of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. And Los Vaqueros Reservoir in Contra Costa County has been enlarged once, with little opposition, and may be enlarged again.
The driving force for restoring Hetch Hetchy is returning the valley to its natural splendor and making Yosemite National Park whole again. Improving water system management to make it happen will be icing on the cake.
Restoring Hetch Hetchy means being serious about water system improvements for San Francisco, so we pay attention to many of the higher profile projects and trends around throughout California. The $500 million project to repair the damaged Friant-Kern Canal is worth noting for several reasons.
After years of seeking sufficient funds, officials ceremoniously broke ground last Tuesday. The Friant-Kern Canal is used to move water from the Friant Dam on the San Joaquin River to farms in Kern County. It has been unable to operate at full capacity for several years as the land beneath it has subsided, ironically due to groundwater pumping. The irony is magnified because, in wet years the Friant-Kern Canal is used very effectively to recharge groundwater – albeit in other areas. (For the most part, the 152 mile-long canal’s beneficiaries are not the same farmers as those whose pumping has damaged the canal – but are located further south.)
California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is designed to prevent land subsidence as well as to help stabilize supplies for generations to come.
Repair of the Friant-Kern Canal has been controversial for two reasons. First, many believe that “users” should pay, rather than be subsidized (most of the cost is being picked up by the federal and state governments). Further Friant Dam and its associated canals have substantially dewatered the San Joaquin River, eliminating historic salmon runs (a restoration programs is underway but in its early stages).
Figure 1: California’s waterworks move water from the wettest to the driest parts of the state. Click to enlarge.
California’s largest canals transport water from north to south (see Figure 1, and click to expand). Friant-Kern is a major canal, part of the Federal Central Valley Project, but is tucked away in the southeast part of the Central Valley so it is seen by few. Any motorist who has traveled Highway 5 between the Bay Area and Los Angeles, however, is familiar with the California Aqueduct and the Delta-Mendota Canal, operated by the State and Federal governments.
The largest canals moving water east to west are the All-American Canal and Colorado River Aqueduct which transport Colorado River supplies to farms in the Imperial Valley and to cities in southern California. Up north, smaller facilities which move water east to west include the Mokelumne River Aqueduct (supplying Oakland and other East Bay cities) and the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct (bringing Tuolumne River to San Francisco and its customers in San Mateo, Santa Clara and Alameda Counties).
San Francisco’s Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct for transporting its Tuolumne River water is actually a series of tunnels and pipelines and, like Friant-Kern, has required substantial upgrades in recent years. The City is planning a 5 year, $140 million project to repair its Mountain Tunnel in the Sierra foothills. In 2015, San Francisco completed construction of a redundant Irvington Tunnel (from Sunol to Fremont, see below) to prevent an extended outage that might be caused by earthquake activity on the Hayward fault. Restore Hetch Hetchy enthusiastically supported the Irvington project amid some controversy and encouraged others to do so – we do not begrudge San Francisco its use of Tuolumne River water; we only insist that they do not store it in Yosemite National Park.
After years of seeking sufficient funds, 
