Sierra News Online posted one of our favorite pictures – the snapshot taken by Matt Stoecker during the filming of Patagonia’s “Damnation”. The inset is Isaiah West Taber’s iconic 1908 photo of Hetch Hetchy.
Our Cherry Solutions report shows that, with reduced demand, San Francisco’s Regional Water System would be extraordinarily reliable even if water were no long stored at Hetch Hetchy and the valley were returned to its original splendor.
Our message is getting through in the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada, with two nice stories this week:
- “SF doesn’t need Hetch Hetchy for today’s use and storage or tomorrow’s climate” – Manteca Bulletin Editor Dennis Wyatt is a long time advocate of restoring Hetch Hetchy, is well versed in California water history and politics.
- “New Study Revives Push To Restore Hetch Hetchy Valley …Without Jeopardizing Bay Area Water Supply” – The Sierra News Online article describes our campaign as renewing a century-old debate (accurately!) and notes that former Yosemite Superintendents support restoration (sitting Superintendents are not allowed to take “political” positions).
We hope to get additional coverage, especially in the Bay Area, and look forward to a response from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission – even though they are highly unlikely to concur with our findings.
San Francisco’s experience is consistent with that of urban water agencies throughout California, as reported in “Water Demand Projection Accuracy and Demand Management Trends in California Cities”, a peer-reviewed journal article by researchers Johanna Capone and Landon Marston in the Virginia Tech Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. They note:
“Municipal water suppliers consistently overestimated future water demand, with one California study finding 98% of water demand forecasts overestimated water demand by an average of 25% (Abraham et al., 2020), highlighting a critical and persistent inaccuracy in water resource planning.”
These findings are good news for California’s cities as well as for our campaign to Restore Hetch Hetchy.
Elsewhere in California, however, water supply struggles continue. Groundwater overdraft continues in many parts of the Central Valley. If you include the amount of water needed to grow the food we eat to what we use in our homes, calculations of personal water consumption are increased several times over.
On the Colorado River the longstanding discrepancy between allocation and availability is coming to a head.
California’s current allocation of 4.4 million acre-feet per year from the Colorado River is exactly 20 times what San Francisco’s Regional Water System has used over the past decade! Hetch Hetchy is small potatoes indeed when it comes to water supply but huge when it comes to the legacy of our national parks and the the opportunity for Yosemite.
The ongoing negotiations over allocations of limited Colorado River water between the seven “Basin States” and Mexico is ongoing. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum called a summit meeting of Governors to try to break the logjam – to no avail so far.
Passions run high among the Basin States, who see the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact (“The Law of the River”) as chiseled in stone. The Colorado River’s flow in the 21st century has averaged only 12.5 million acre-feet, far less that both the 18 million acre-feet when the Compact was created and the 16.5 million acre-feet presently allocated to the Basin States and to Mexico.
We wish the Secretary luck, but guess the matter will eventually be decided in court.