An Effort to Undo an Old Reservoir in Yosemite nytimes.com
[ California water stories are always interesting, and they always make me think of the movie Chinatown. I got to dig up some old stories I remember on the general topic, but more specifically on Hetch Hetchy there was this recent story. Excerpt: ]
In the old days, Hetch Hetchy — it was named by the Ahwahneechee and Paiute Indians for the type of grass that once grew there — was a breathtaking glacier-carved valley in a newly established national park, not unlike Yosemite along the Merced River. But Congress voted in 1913 to allow San Francisco, 160 miles to the west, to flood the valley in an effort to secure a reliable water supply. Richard W. Sellars, a longtime National Park Service historian, describes the decision as "the most famous and egregious invasion of a national park."
[John] Muir was a fierce opponent of the reservoir, and was said to have died of a broken heart in 1914 after failing to block it. "Dam Hetch Hetchy!" he wrote in his book "The Yosemite." "As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man."
Among Restore Hetch Hetchy's supporters is Donald P. Hodel, the former secretary of the interior under President Ronald Reagan, who floated a similar restoration proposal in the late 1980's. Though the dismantling of productive dams is not common practice, Mr. Hodel said he got the idea from Rocky Mountain National Park, where a damaged dam was taken down a decade ago. Since then, there have been other dismantling of dams, especially ones that interfered with fisheries.
Like Muir before him, Mr. Hodel was silenced by powerful water interests. Mr. Hodel said he had little in common with the new group pushing for the Hetch Hetchy study, but he was willing to lend his name to the cause because he still believed in it. He also remained incensed at what he described as the duplicity of many San Franciscans. They are known to champion environmental causes, he said, but seem blind to the destructiveness of their own water policies.
"All of the arguments made against a study of Hetch Hetchy were about San Francisco's birthright to flood that valley — that it is our vested economic right," Mr. Hodel said in telephone interview from Colorado, where he lives in semi-retirement. "Those are the same arguments made by slaveholders in opposition to abolition."
[ much more info at the eponymous hetchhetchy.org ] |
